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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24885805">The Mystery Of The Slotted Spoon</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snapjack/pseuds/Snapjack'>Snapjack</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Actor RPF, British Actor RPF, Taylor Swift (Musician)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>1950s, 1950s Slang, Alternate Universe - 1950s, Alternate Universe - British, Alternate Universe - Detectives, British, Cozy, Cozy English mystery, Detectives, F/M, Gaslighting, Happy Ending, Hiddleswift - Freeform, Historical, Mental Institutions, Mystery, RPF, Romance, Slow Romance, Twee</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-06-24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 00:42:14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>45,650</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24885805</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snapjack/pseuds/Snapjack</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"What do you mean, there's another bloody sleuth in town?" cried Thomas, startling the cat which had been snoozing on his lap and getting a rather painful puncturing with the rear claws. His chair swayed dangerously backwards as he fought to regain his balance, scrabbling for purchase on the paper-swamped edge of his desk. Mrs. Emma Thompson, librarian, regarded him with an air of phlegmatic acceptance.<br/>"Just that, my dear," she said patiently. "Her name is--"<br/>"Her??"<br/>"Yes, her, this would go ever so much faster if you wouldn't interrupt so, her name is Miss Swift, and she's from America."</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Emma Thompson/OC, Tom Hiddleston/Taylor Swift</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Mystery Of The Slotted Spoon</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic originated out of a discussion on one of my private FB groups during the actual relationship of Tom Hiddleston and Taylor Swift, a romance as short-lived as it was controversial. I was arguing on the "I can see this, actually," side of the debate, and to illustrate the point I sketched out this quick idea: "They must now marry and have either very tall children or just very leggity Great Danes and live in a rambling yet impeccably decorated English country mansion." </p><p>Another user commented, "I can't believe you just stole my fanfic", to which I of course responded, "In Hiddleswift manor, two lanky detectives touch off a long-simmering romance while confronting a mystery on the moors". </p><p>FOUR! YEARS! LATER! </p><p>HERE WE FUCKING ARE. There are no moors. But there is a mystery.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>"What do you mean, there's another bloody sleuth in town?" cried Thomas, startling the cat which had been snoozing on his lap and getting a rather painful puncturing with the rear claws. His chair swayed dangerously backwards as he fought to regain his balance, scrabbling for purchase on the paper-swamped edge of his desk. Mrs. Emma Thompson, librarian, regarded him with an air of phlegmatic acceptance. </p><p>"Just that, my dear," she said patiently. "Her name is--"</p><p>
  <em>"Her??"</em>
</p><p>"Yes, her, this would go ever so much faster if you wouldn't interrupt so, her name is Miss Swift, and she's from America." </p><p><em>"From America!??!!"</em> Thomas sputtered. </p><p>"Yes, from America, and it doesn't make you sound particularly bright when you insist on repeating people, my dear," said Ms. Thompson placidly.</p><p>"I have to stop her," Thomas muttered to himself, staring into the middle distance. </p><p>"Or you could simply go over to Bolter's Street and introduce yourself," said Ms. Thompson. </p><p>"Yes. That. So I can conduct reconnaissance, and therefore defeat her," said Thomas, bolting upright and stepping purposefully over a pile of papers, on top of which were stacked several tea saucers, on top of which were stacked (precariously) orange peels. </p><p>"A tie wouldn’t go amiss, my dear," Ms. Thompson pointed out tactfully. </p><p>"Right. A tie." Thomas whirled, searching first the old wooden secretary, then the umbrella stand, then the hat rack, then (hopefully) the interior of the large rose-print lampshade. Ms. Thompson watched the proceedings with raised eyebrows, finally sighing. </p><p>"In the dresser, I'd imagine."</p><p>"Right!" </p><p>"Top drawer, dear." </p><p>"Correct you are, Ms. Thompson."</p><p>"And to think," she said placidly, brushing specks of dust off his jacket and folding his collar down as they descended the stairs, "I pay <em>you</em> to find things out." </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"Competition? None worth mentioning," Taylor said, meticulously applying lipstick in her compact mirror. She shifted the circle of light to check the effect of the bright red tone against her best hat, a sharp black half hat with a white polka-dotted bit of veil. </p><p>"I heard there was a very well-established detective in town," said Miss Kloss, unfolding a sheet from Taylor's steamer trunk and shaking it to loosen the creases. </p><p>"Really? I heard he found lost housecats," Taylor said primly, nodding at her reflection as she decided it was very good indeed. "Lost pets and missing spectacles, can-you-find-my-husband, oh-look, he's-at-the-bar."</p><p>"Pub."</p><p>"Pardon?"</p><p>"Not a bar, a pub," said Miss Kloss. "If you're ever going to fit in, you must learn the local terms for things."</p><p>Taylor snapped her compact shut with a brilliant smile. "Karlie darling, if I was interested in fitting in, I'd have stayed with Calvin."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Which sounded very grand, as a phrase, and Taylor was proud of having thought of it—but which made it all rather galling when, on her way down the stairs from the small apartment over the florists', she threw open the door to the street and nearly fell directly into her competition. Behind her, Miss Kloss, unable to see over her large armful of moving blankets, ran into her back, thus bumping her even farther into the personal realm of one Mr. Thomas Hiddleston. </p><p>"Miss Swift, I presume?" he said, helping her regain her footing. He had rather blue eyes. </p><p>"Mister Huddleston," she said, flustered, at which point Miss Kloss hissed the correct name in her ear. "Hiddleston! Mister Hiddleston," she repeated quickly, hoping the mistake would go unnoticed. “This is my associate, Miss Kloss.”</p><p>He whipped off his hat and, with a flourish, made an almost comically low bow towards her. "Pleased to make your acquaintance.  And yours, Miss Kloss," he added as a passing aside to Karlie, who gave Taylor an<em> insufferably </em>smug little smile as she curtsied back on her way around the pair, taking off down the street at high speed. Even from behind, her posture said "I told you so, I told you so." The Little Engine That Wouldn't Let It Go. Taylor realized she was still narrowing her eyes down the street at her assistant, and turned her attention back to Mr. Hiddleston, who was still smiling at her in the most unnerving way. Behind him, a rather severe-looking lady of indeterminate age lightly cleared her throat; Thomas jumped, then looked mortified. </p><p>"I am so sorry, I do apologize, I should have introduced you two, this is—"</p><p>"Emma Thompson," the lady intervened, leaning in to take Taylor's gloved hand in her own. "Librarian."</p><p>"And genealogist," Mr. Hiddleston added. </p><p>"Amateur," demurred Ms. Thompson.</p><p><em>"Wonderful,"</em> corrected Mr. Hiddleston lightly.</p><p>"Flatterer."</p><p>"Invaluable assistant."</p><p>
  <em>"Client."</em>
</p><p>"Yes, that, too. Ms. Thompson taught me Sunday school," said Mr. Hiddleston solemnly, and Taylor fought back a wild urge to laugh. </p><p>"Indeed, it seems you are a very helpful person to know. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Ms. Thompson." </p><p>"Yes," said Ms. Thompson. "And yours, Miss Swift. Now, if I'm to attain a seat on the Market Drayton bus, and not be standing all the way to Eccleshall, I must off. Mister Hiddleston," the older lady said a bit severely.</p><p>"Ms. Thompson," he replied, in a tone of deep gravity and respect belied only by the twinkle in his eye, and she was off. </p><p>"That woman is the wind beneath my wings," remarked Thomas, and as Taylor struggled to catch up, she found herself once again caught in the intensely blue gaze of Mr. Hiddleston. <br/>
"Miss Swift," he said, smiling. Taylor waited, but nothing else seemed forthcoming--it seemed he was simply saying her name for the pleasure of saying it; or had forgotten his thought entirely; or perhaps he was waiting for her to reveal something about herself. At any rate, it occurred to her that she had spent rather enough time staring into his eyes--lovely as they were--and she resolved to say something. The trouble was thinking of what to say. As she worked her mouth open and closed, somewhat like a guppy, he saved her the trouble. </p><p>"You're from America, aren't you?"</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>He extended his elbow. "Then you must be dying for a cup of coffee." <br/>
<br/>
</p><p><em>"How!?</em> How did you know!??" Miss Swift enthused, throwing her head back in exaltation and drumming her heels on the rungs of her seat. She had been carrying on in this vein for some time, and the other patrons of the small cafeteria were beginning to look quite annoyed. Mister Hiddleston, by contrast, seemed utterly charmed; he was resting his elbow on the counter, beaming at her obvious joy. </p><p>"Oh but you have no idea," she said. "None. Not since I got on the ship have I had a decent cup."</p><p>"Is that where you're from, Newark?"</p><p>"Oh, way off, way off." Taylor flapped one hand dismissively in the air. "Wyomissing, Pennsylvania."</p><p>"Wyomissing!" he exclaimed delightedly, in much the same tone he'd used to repeatedly savor the sound of her name. He'd said it approximately six more times since sitting down, in increasing tones of delight. Miss Swift. She was beginning to like the sound of it. </p><p>"Wyomissing," she agreed, setting the cup down in its saucer. Behind the counter, the waitresses visibly conferred amongst themselves, trying to determine if it was safe or wise to offer her more. "I left as fast as I could."</p><p>"And where did you leave to?" </p><p>"Nashville," she said. </p><p>"Nashville! Why, I love country music! I have all of Hank Williams' records, I buy every single one as fast as I can get them!" </p><p>"You do??" she said, caught off guard. </p><p>"Of course! 'You're Gonna Change, Or I'm Gonna Leave'? 'Mind Your Own Business'? Who comes up with titles like that?"</p><p>"Why, rude Americans, of course," said Taylor, laughing. Somehow, her hand was on his sleeve.</p><p>"No, wonderfully direct Americans! You'd never get anything like that out of us, we just stammer and then apologize when we're angry." </p><p>"Nonsense, you're lovely people," Taylor said briskly. "Now, who do I have to kick around here to get some more coffee?"<br/>
<br/>
</p><p>"So, what you're saying is, you enjoyed your date," Karlie said that evening, brushing her hair upside-down for bed. </p><p>"It wasn't a date," Taylor said, brushing her own right-side-up. "It was two contemporaries meeting. Cordially. It was cordial."</p><p>"Over coffee."</p><p>"He intuited my need for coffee, based on my being an American. Hardly a great leap of logic. Englishmen drink tea, I could have done the same if he'd been the tourist in New York or Nashville or..." she drifted off. </p><p>"What?"</p><p>"I told him where I was born."</p><p>"What?" Karlie popped back up from her deep bend, a look of shock on her face.</p><p>"I told him about Wyomissing," said Taylor, looking no less shocked than her friend. "With that—with a person's place of birth and last name..."</p><p>"You can find out nearly anything about them," Karlie completed her thought. With a heavy whumpf, they both sat down on their feather-ticked mattresses. </p><p><em>"How—"</em> began Karlie, just as Taylor said, "He's really<em> good."</em></p><p>"I should say so."</p><p>"Yes." </p><p>"Indeed."</p><p>"Mmmm."</p><p>"This is very bad news."</p><p>"Mmmm."<br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p>"Report," said Ms. Thompson on the phone, getting admirably to the point.</p><p>"Well, I think I did a pretty good job of scaring her off," said Thomas, tipping a glass of water over the potted peace lily in his living room window. </p><p>"And how did you accomplish that?" </p><p>"Well, first I invited her to coffee," said Thomas. </p><p>"Yes?"</p><p>"And then I questioned her about her past. She's a fellow country music enthusiast! Or at least, I think she is. She spent some time in Nashville. Did you know that Hank Williams has put out several records we haven't even heard of here yet? Apparently there's quite a delay in the international market."</p><p>"Fascinating," said Ms. Thompson. "Then what?"</p><p>"What do you mean, then what?"</p><p>"The part where you frightened her off of your turf, what. How did you make it plain that your business was not to be encroached upon?"</p><p>"I made some rather cutting observations about the nature of the British character."</p><p>"Did you now?"</p><p>"I did. Of course, upon reflection, they all rather cut into the British character. I'm afraid I said we tended to apologize and to dither a bit."</p><p>"I can't imagine why," said Ms. Thompson. "And the threatening?"</p><p>"Erm," said Thomas. </p><p>"So what you're telling me is that, instead of scaring off your competitor, you've actually taken her out on a date."</p><p>Thomas sunk into his armchair and massaged the bridge of his nose. "I am, at this very moment, hideously enough, realizing that that is precisely what I have done."</p><p>"Well then," said Ms. Thompson crisply. "I imagine today's diary entry will be creative," and hung up.</p><p><br/>
The problem with having a wise and well-connected benefactor like Ms. Thompson who has known one since one was in swaddling clothes, is that she is very often correct. Thomas resolved to put the date with Miss Swift out of his mind entirely. This plan succeeded marvelously, until he woke up the next morning, and then consciousness put the resolution swiftly—aha, there she was again—to rout. When he found himself standing in front of his icebox, busily applying marmalade to his sleeve, he decided it was going to be a thoroughly useless day and decided to spend it the best way possible; at the library. </p><p> </p><p>"You know, you really ought to get out more," said Ms. Thompson, setting down the 1823-4 baptism index with a dusty thud. "People will begin to say I'm the only person you know."</p><p>"Let them talk," said Thomas absently. "You're the only person worth knowing in this town, anyway."</p><p>"I wasn't concerned about your reputation, I was speaking of my own," said Ms. Thompson, but looked mildly mollified by the compliment. "Anyway, it's not normal for young men to spend long hours at the library on beautiful summer days. You should be out. Frolicking."</p><p>"Instead of working on your case?" Thomas said, dizzy with the scent of ancient records and already wondering if the bastardy papers might have a better record of the doings of his elusive and frustratingly infertile eighth Earl of Rutland.</p><p>"Oh, hang my case," said Ms. Thompson, and the frustration in her tone was enough to jog Thomas out of his stupor. He looked up; Ms. Thompson, visibly empurpled, was chewing on her lip as though a teakettle's worth of pressure was building inside of her.</p><p>"What's wrong?"</p><p>"My son's in town again," she said quietly. </p><p>"Oh," said Thomas. "Oh dear."</p><p>"I know it shouldn't matter to me after all these years. Why should it matter if he chooses to see his father and not me? He's a grown man who can make his own choices. I shouldn't be so sensitive about it. Heaven knows I made mine."</p><p>"He's your son," Thomas said gently. "It's natural you should want to see him." Privately, he thought that if he ever met Ms. Thompson's loutish son, he'd knock him straight onto the cobblestones. Priest's collar or no. <br/>
"Any road," Ms. Thompson was saying, visibly gathering herself back up, "There's no point crying over what can't be helped. He'll do as he pleases. Shall we try the bastardy index next?"</p><p>Thomas reached an internal decision. "No." Rising, he closed the baptism index with a resounding thud. "Ms. Thompson, we are going out."</p><p>"What? No, heavens, not on my account—"</p><p>"You said yourself it was a marvelous day. Come, I'm taking you to the pictures and then we're going to have a picnic." </p><p>"You can't afford that, I'm your only client."</p><p>"I'll buy the pictures and you buy the beer?"</p><p>"Done." </p><p> </p><p>Leaving "Adam's Rib", Ms. Thompson's spirits seemed much restored—she had just flicked a pellet of unpopped popcorn in Thomas's general direction (repayment, if he understood it correctly, for the unwelcome news that Spencer Tracy was taken), when her face lit with an entirely new interest. </p><p>"Look who it is," she said. </p><p>Thomas followed her line of sight. "Oh, dear." Several yards away, a crowd of giggling girls descended the steps of a carriage bus, one tall blond head in particular bobbing above the rest. </p><p>"Well, she certainly makes friends quickly," observed Ms. Thompson. </p><p>"Indeed she does," said Thomas, watching how Miss Kloss and the four other girls, all varying degrees of brunette, huddled around Miss Swift, the clear leader of their little group. He was so focused, in fact, that he failed to notice the catlike smirk on Ms. Thompson's face until it was far too late.</p><p>"Well, don't just stand there, go and say hello," she said tartly, and gave him a quite thoroughly Hepburn-like shove right in the shoulderblades. </p><p>He approached the group of girls, feeling every atom of the awkwardness, the gangling awful height that had made boarding school such a torture, and childhood itself a lonely thing. Impossible, at moments like these, not to wish oneself invisible, erased. How on earth did other men just walk up to girls? Thankfully, Miss Swift spotted him before her shorter coterie—once her tall blonde head swiveled his way, all the other girls' did too. The effect was rather like being spotted by an ostrich, and then eyed, rather beadily, by all its children. </p><p>"Miss Swift."</p><p>"Mister Hiddleston," she said, speculatively, weighing the word on her tongue like a marble. "Fancy seeing you here." The group swayed around her, visibly mentally retailoring every inch of his clothing and possibly, his person. </p><p>"I've just been to the theater," he said, "With Ms. Thompson. Terrific film, apparently Spencer Tracy is really worth seeing if you're into that sort of thing." He trailed off, keenly aware he was babbling. The ostrich family looked to her—then to him again—then burst into a cloud of affectionate chatter, of which he was only able to pick out, "haven't introduced" and "you didn't tell us" and "why can't Karlie find a man like this" and "Hey!" </p><p>Miss Swift's eyes swept him up and down, then narrowed. "Ladies, I am going to heartlessly abandon our hat shopping and take Mister Hiddleston for a drink." A minor blast of giggles and whispered asides whooshed all around them, and then she was linking her arm through his. Only the last remaining fragments of his presence of mind caused him to pause. </p><p>"Hold on, I've got a friend who is—" behind him, he saw Ms. Thompson, who was smirking terribly, shoo him away emphatically—"just leaving, apparently." Turning back to Miss Swift, who wore a conspiratorial expression, he took a deep breath, girding himself. </p><p>"Lead the way."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>It turned out, rather disappointingly, that Miss Swift wanted to talk business. It being Miss Swift, she did so over coffee. Thomas wasn't sure how she managed to secure coffee in a pub—he couldn't be entirely certain that the barkeep's son had not been buttonholed, then sent over to the boarding house across the way to secure a single cup of coffee. As in the coffee shop in Stafford, the staff seemed terrifically intimidated by her, an awe which in no way seemed to have rubbed off on Thomas—he had been trying for fifteen minutes to gain the attention of the barkeep.</p><p>"... which is how Karlie and I came to be friends, which is how I came back to England with her," Miss Swift was saying, and Thomas lost the best chance he had at gaining the bartender's eyesight as he realized this was his cue to speak. </p><p>"Indeed—so Miss Kloss is your native guide, as it were."</p><p>"Yes! That's exactly what she is," Miss Swift said delightedly. "She is the Friday to my Robinson Crusoe, and she will speak the native tongue for me, and help me avoid terrible peril, and, and..."</p><p>"And shoot any treacherous enemies with poisonous blowdarts?" Thomas suggested. </p><p><em>"Yes,"</em> Miss Swift said rapturously. "Yes, that's it precisely. Plus, her cousin Cyd, that's the pretty one with the freckles mind you, she works at the<em> phone</em> company, so that's going to be just invaluable."</p><p>"Indeed," said Thomas, then realized he had no idea what she was talking about. "Wait. Invaluable how?"</p><p>"Why, for business!" said Miss Swift. "Haven't you found phone operators just impossible to do without?"</p><p>Thomas frowned. "For what?"</p><p>"Why, for everything! For information! For who places phone calls, when, and to whom?"</p><p>"I'm afraid that my clientele rarely needs to know that sort of thing."</p><p>Miss Swift blinked rapidly. "But what about the wives?"</p><p>"What wives?"</p><p>"You know. Wives who want to know if their husbands are unfaithful." </p><p>"Oh, I don't take that sort of case." </p><p>"You don't take... but aren't you're a private investigator?"</p><p>"Of course, but I don't take... listen, I think of myself as more of a private, erm, a researcher! A researcher, for hire," Thomas said. "I conduct all sorts of investigations, into matters that others have neither the time nor the patience to adequately research, claims as to title and landedness, various precedents for court cases, issues of family heritage and titling. I don't involve myself in lurid marital squabbles and, and other such salacious gossip. My clients have much weightier issues on their minds."</p><p>Miss Swift set her coffee cup down in the saucer with a delicate clink. "Is that so," she said. </p><p>"Yes," said Thomas, dimly aware that an icy chill had rolled in, somehow, clouding the August air like an unseasonable fog.</p><p>"Hmm. So the terrible weight on the mind of a young woman, early married off and only now beginning to suspect that the man she's been bound to is dangerous, this is nothing."</p><p>"I didn't say—"</p><p>"When a mother realizes that her husband and the father of her children is, in fact, the husband of someone else and the father of another woman's children, and that her entire life is a lie, this is just salacious gossip."</p><p>"Oh come now, surely that can't be freque—"</p><p>"It's <em>incredibly</em> frequent, I made my career on secret bigamists, nearly thirty percent of traveling salesmen are. But let's talk about something less <em>lurid</em>. How about new identities for women who have escaped violent husbands?"</p><p>"I really don't see where that's the business of a private—"</p><p>"No, of course you wouldn't, because you're busy dealing with <em>important</em> matters, like who inherits what parcel of land and what title from what long-expired relative. Tell me, when deciding what is <em>a matter of importance</em>, how come the concerns of dead men always outweigh those of living women?" </p><p>Thomas opened his mouth to respond. Then closed it again. Then opened it. Then closed it again. He repeated this action so many times that the bartender, apparently taking pity on him, came by and refilled his glass so that he would have something to do with his mouth instead of that. He sipped, gratefully and long, and when he came up for air found there was only one thing to say. </p><p>"I have just been an absolute tit, haven't I?"</p><p>"Rather."</p><p>"Indeed. Well, it was bound to happen eventually. I can only saw that I very much regret it having happened so early on in our relationship, when you have so little else to compare it to. I can only imagine that right now, in your mind, the preponderance of data points toward my indeed, being a tit, and rather away from the non-tit conclusion—"</p><p>"Mister Hiddleston."</p><p>"I can only hope that I can in fact—"</p><p>"Mister Hiddleston."</p><p>"Convince you that there are times when, perhaps not now but someday, I might--"</p><p><em>"Thomas."</em> She laid one gloved hand delicately on his forearm, and he shut up. "Are you trying to apologize for belittling my work?"</p><p><em>"Yes,"</em> he said rather fervently. </p><p>"Then the apology is accepted." She folded her hands back into her own lap, over her pocketbook. He observed her posture, her expression—a little less warm than before, though no less polite—and thought <em>No. No, this just won't do.</em></p><p>"Allow me to make it up to you. Please. There must be some way I can offer my assistance. While I don't have inside contacts at the phone company, you may find…" He trailed off, noticing that Miss Swift's cheeks were stained a deep red, and that she was looking away rather shyly as her hands fluttered in her lap. "What. I've said something?"</p><p>"No," she said, "It's just... I rather <em>could</em> use your help."</p><p>"Anything."</p><p>She said it so quietly he needed to ask her to repeat herself. Then he made her repeat it again. </p><p>"I need your help on a matter of genealogy and titling."</p><p>He sat back. Then he held up one finger, shaking it slightly. "Ah-ah-ah."</p><p>"Don't say it."</p><p>"Ahhh!!!!"</p><p>"Don't say it!"</p><p>"You need my help."</p><p>"Mister Hiddleston."</p><p>"On a matter of <strong><em>genealogy</em></strong> and—what was it?"</p><p>"Please."</p><p>"Oh! It was <strong><em>titling</em></strong>! Which was, if I'm not mistaken, a concern only of dead men?"</p><p>"All right," said Miss Swift tartly, fetching a napkin and neatly flagging the bartender. "Check, please."</p><p>"No, wait," said Thomas, and now it was his turn to touch her arm. "I'm sorry. I was only teasing. Please don't go."</p><p>She turned her exasperated gaze on him, and he continued. "I could think of nothing better to do than to help you with your claim."</p><p>"It's not a claim. It's a mystery."</p><p>"Even better, I love those." </p><p>"It may not lead anywhere."</p><p>"Some of the best mysteries don't," he said, and watched as her blue gaze melted into something like a smile. </p><p>"All right then." </p><p>She opened her pocketbook and took out a sheet of paper, somewhat yellowed. Unfolding it carefully, she hesitated. "Please don't laugh." </p><p>He sobered his expression and straightened his spine. "I wouldn't. I promise." </p><p>She set the paper down on the bar, slid it towards him. He looked closely at it. In thick black ink, carefully drawn, a bare arm raised aloft a ladle, or... not a ladle, but more like a serving spoon with drainage slashes. The arm had no body--it was just an arm, the sleeve rolled up. </p><p>"What is this?"</p><p>She chewed her lip, looking deeply bashful. "I was hoping that you'd recognize it right away. Now my explanation is going to sound silly." </p><p>"Not at all, please."</p><p>"Please understand that I know how crazy this sounds," she said. "But I think it's my family crest." </p><p>"Your family crest," Thomas said doubtfully. "But you're—"</p><p>"An American, yes I know," she said, "But here's the thing, we haven't been there very long! My grandma, she was born in England! And when I was ten, she started getting sick, and she drew this for me, and she told me it was our family crest, and that it was on some big hall, somewhere in England. And my mother, she said it was just because my grandma wanted me to feel important, but that's the thing, <em>my grandma wouldn't have done that! </em>She never flattered us or told us lies just to make us feel better—my grandma ruined Santa Claus for me! My grandma told me that my cat was dead because it got hit by a car while I was at school! When my parents told me that my baby brother was brought by a stork, she pitched a fit and bought me a biology textbook for medical students!" </p><p>"She sounds like a formidable woman," Thomas said, struggling to master his expression. </p><p>"You think I'm being silly," said Miss Swift, looking a bit wounded. </p><p>"No! No, on the contrary," said Thomas. "I believe I am seeing precisely where your spirit comes from. Miss Swift," he said decisively, slapping his hand down on the drawing, "I am taking your case." </p><p>"Really?"</p><p>"Really. We are going to solve the mystery of..." he rotated the drawing and looked at it closely, at last alighting on the term which had eluded him. Years of bachelorhood did not lend themselves to an extensive kitchen vocabulary.  "The Mystery of the Slotted Spoon. And we are going to find your ancestral home, wherever it is." </p><p>Miss Swift made a noise that could only be described as a squeak, and then she was off her chair and hugging him—which was a shock, not only because Miss Swift hugged very tightly indeed and he couldn't remember the last time he'd been in the presence of someone<em> quite so American</em>, but also because, against all his upbringing and the terrible tyranny of his shyness, he found himself hugging back. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"And you are now her assistant," Ms. Thompson observed rather acidy, watching as Thomas leaned backwards in his chair, looking through a piece of tracing paper on which Miss Swift had transcribed her grandmother's mysterious cipher. "How quickly the tables turn."</p><p>"It's a fascinating mystery," Thomas said, rotating the paper a quarter turn. "I've never seen anything like it."</p><p>"Not, perhaps, in the troves of the Wolverhampton Library?" Ms. Thompson said, and Thomas froze. The realization crashed over him like a plume of dirty puddle water from a milk truck, soaking and unavoidable. </p><p>"I stood you up, didn’t I."</p><p>"Yes, you ruddy well did. I had to face that bloody awful harpy Maureen Becker in the bowels of the genealogy section, and do you know she is <em>still</em> banging on about that leeway the Council granted through her backyard in thirty-two!" </p><p>Thomas closed his eyes and dropped his face into his hands. "Oh no. I am so sorry."</p><p>"I got to hear, yet again, how it was utterly unfair that <em>single</em> people, <em>unsettled</em> people—by which she means me—got to keep their gardens, while good God-fearing families had to lose theirs!"</p><p>"I completely forgot. I am a prize arse," said Thomas. </p><p>"Yes, you are," said Ms. Thompson, and sat down rather heavily. "You're lucky I found something that made it all worthwhile." As Thomas looked up, she reached into her bag and pulled out a notebook. </p><p>"The location of the Earl of Rutland's final resting place."</p><p>
  <em>"No."</em>
</p><p>"Yes indeed. He's in Yorkshire."</p><p>"What the blazes is he doing all the way up there?"</p><p>"I don't know, but I intend to have words with his gravestone for making me look all over the country for him. Are you coming with me, or shall I cede to your calendar?"</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The cemetery in which the Earl of Rutland had found his final repose was beautiful, sloping, a bit unkempt—Thomas knelt in the high grass, feeling bits of ticklish hay work their way into his shirtwaist as he rubbed at the tombstone with a thick blue crayon. On the other side, Ms. Thompson, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth, focused on creating her own rubbing, this one with green crayon. They had a system for tombstones and they liked to stick with it--Ms. Thompson, a dedicated sketcher and watercolorist, always took the fronts, where there was a lot of information and fine detail. Thomas, whose artistic skills she charitably termed "rot", took the sides and back, where information was vanishingly rare. It worked for them. </p><p>"Do you know," Ms. Thompson said, out of the blue after nearly twenty minutes of uninterrupted work, "I don't even think it's the seeing his father that bothers me the most about it all." </p><p>Thomas, well versed in the ebbs and flows of Ms. Thompson's reticence, schooled his expression and angled down the skinny edge of the tombstone. "No?"</p><p>"No. It's that he became a bloody <em>priest</em>. After what he saw his father do, after what... <em>they</em> put me through. That he could still..." Ms. Thompson trailed off, and Thomas waited as she worked through what she would say next. </p><p>"Well. I suppose I thought a mother might count on a bit more loyalty." </p><p>Thomas waited until he was certain no more would be forthcoming. "You ought to have been able to." </p><p>Ms. Thompson made a small grunt that could have been agreement, perhaps not. After a time she sat back and wiped her hands, smeared as they were with green crayon. "Well, there's no helping it now. What's done is done, and what's warranted certainly doesn't enter into the picture. Look at me, bleating on about what I deserve as if this cemetery isn't filled with mother's sons."</p><p>They looked around the cemetery. At the top row, several meters of forest had been shaved back to make room for the rows of war dead. Against the peacefully slope-shouldered and lichened stones of the village's earlier history, they looked unsettlingly white and clean. Thomas thought of saying something, but the look on Ms. Thompson's face dissuaded him—some hurts are too personal, too private for words. Instead, he gave her his understanding, and they sat together in silence for some time.</p><p> </p><p>"Well, this is something," said Ms. Thompson, back in the comfortable, slightly dusty air of the public library where they spent so much of their time. The town parish held a great many more records. For many reasons, Ms. Thompson refused to enter it.</p><p>"What?"</p><p>"Well, there's no record here of any Martin at all in the Rutland peerage. I've checked now in five years going either direction outside his birth and his death." </p><p>Thomas blinked. "Why would he be in a Yorkshire cemetery and not--</p><p>"In the Rutland mausoleum, precisely. I'm thinking more and more that our eighth Earl of Rutland was a bit of a black sheep. I mean, when you think about it, how often does any monarchy lose track of an Earl?"</p><p>"Not often."</p><p>"Exactly. I mean it would be another story if we were talking about some sheep-shearer, some poor sod with a donkey, we'd be completely buggered," said Ms. Thompson, who became most delightfully profane when she was lost in her genealogy. "But this is different, this is an earl with over five hundred acres of land at his disposal, a castle, and a sizeable inheritance which we know to be split only three ways. Why's all the history gone with his brothers? What's Martin done wrong?"</p><p>"A duel?" Thomas suggested. "Maybe he went to Yorkshire to settle some argument, lost the fight, and they buried him right there rather than ship him back."</p><p>"Aaahh," said Ms. Thompson, waving the suggestion away. "When have you ever known a Yorkshireman to duel. If they have a problem with you there, they just slit your throat, sink you in a peat bog and have done with it. No, it was something else. Something else caused this young man to be forsaken by his family, but given a very nice burial by someone else's."</p><p>"A homosexual?" said Thomas hopefully. He did love homosexuals in history, they always left such a delightful wake of innuendo in the books. </p><p>"A Midlands homosexual given a whopping great expensive headstone right <em>next</em> to the county church in a rural Yorkshire parish," said Ms. Thompson. "You really haven't any mind for genealogy, have you?"</p><p>"Damn," said Thomas. "We'd probably have more to go on then."</p><p>"Only if you view the lack of evidence as a lack of evidence," said Ms. Thompson. "You really must read more Conan Doyle, he's remarkably eloquent about the role that absence can play as a clue."</p><p>"You haven't got the faintest idea either," said Thomas, and Ms. Thompson's smile twitched. </p><p>"Not a clue," she admitted, dropping heavily into her chair. "And I'm completely knackered from that awful bus trip. Come, give me something else to think about." She held out her hand rather grandly, wiggling her fingers. "Come on, give it over."</p><p>"Give what over?"</p><p>"Don't be thick. The drawing Miss Swift gave you. I've seen you peeking at it sixteen times today when you thought I wasn't looking. Let's have a look at it, then." </p><p>Thomas gave it over. "There's really no slipping anything past you, is there."</p><p>"Not until you get quite a lot better at it," said Ms. Thompson, unfolding the paper and rotating it a quarter turn, then another quarter turn, peering at it sternly through her spectacles. "Whatever am I looking at?"</p><p>"It's a slotted spoon," said Thomas helpfully, and she glared at him through the spectacles. </p><p>He grinned at her cheerfully. </p><p>"As if you've ever used one," she grumbled. "Remember when I caught you storing kitchen borax directly next to the white sugar? How would that have turned out, I wonder."</p><p>"An intervention for which I remain eternally grateful." </p><p>"Hmm. No, what I mean is, what is it doing here? This is highly irregular for any type of crest, I hope you realize."<br/>
"I do."</p><p>"The girl's grandmother was almost certainly talking rubbish."</p><p>"Almost certainly."</p><p>"And yet you intend to pursue it."</p><p>"I do." </p><p>"Hmm," she said. Then, "It could be a guild emblem."</p><p>"Could it now." </p><p>"Perhaps. Copied incompletely, and only from memory, but see here, where the arm ends..." Thomas edged his chair closer, and under the soft green light of the library's lamps, learned from the master. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"And then he keeps getting these phone calls, and I <em>know</em> they're about me, but he keeps telling me to go upstairs, as if I haven't the right to know! He says it will just upset me to know, but aren't I upset enough knowing that they're talking about me?"</p><p>"Of<em> course</em> you're upset," said Miss Swift, patting the sobbing young woman's back soothingly, while looking to Miss Kloss, then pointedly to the tissue box. Miss Kloss startled back to alertness--she had been drifting somewhat for the last five minutes--and brought the tissues over to the client, who took one and blew, moistly and at some length. </p><p>"Now, Jessie, I want you to listen to me," said Miss Swift. "I want you to dry your eyes and take a deep breath. I am going to take your case. I am going to find out what's being said, and put an end to it. Your husband has no right to make you feel this way, and neither does your doctor. I don't care what school he went to or who else in town knows him. We're going to get to the bottom of this, and I promise, no matter what, you will <em>not</em> end up in an institution." </p><p>"You promise?" whispered Jessie, and then burst into tears afresh. </p><p>"Oh <em>yes</em>, sweetie. Yes, I promise," said Miss Swift, and Jessie hurled herself into the sleuth's arms for another round of loud, cathartic howling. "There, there," Taylor said, patting Jessie on the back and doing her best to conceal her discomfort with kneeling on the floor and being half-strangled by a crying stranger. Over Jessie's heaving back, Miss Kloss gave her a "Better you than me" sort of look. Miss Swift closed her eyes, and breathed, and when Jessie finally calmed, showed her downstairs and wished her a warm farewell, for now. </p><p>To Karlie, she said, "That's the third woman I've heard complain about this Doctor Gottwald." </p><p>"I know," said Miss Kloss, her eyes focused steadily on the receding back of Jessie. </p><p>"I don't like it," said Taylor.</p><p>"I know," said Karlie. "What are we going to do about it?"</p><p>Taylor's eyes narrowed. "We're going to take someone out for lunch."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"So you want me to spy on the town doctor's conversations," Karlie's cousin Cyd said, neatly sawing a bit of veal away from the bone and delicately popping it in her mouth. Her pinkies stayed well away from her knife and fork, and her eyes were very, very blue. </p><p>"Yes," said Taylor. </p><p>"His conversations about his patients."</p><p>"Yes."</p><p>"His conversations that he has with his patients' husbands."</p><p>"Yes." </p><p>Cyd set her silverware down. "Very good then. When do we start?"</p><p>Taylor blinked. "Why... today, I suppose, if you can."</p><p>Cyd dabbed at her Cupid's Bow delicately with a lace napkin. "Yes. That will be fine. Now, have you been enjoying the British countryside at all, Miss Swift?" </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>While walking back to the florist's, Taylor pondered how best to voice her concerns. Finally, she spoke up. "Karlie..."</p><p>"Yes?"</p><p>"Are you sure that your cousin—well, are you sure she's really fully at ease with assisting us?"</p><p>Karlie smiled like a cat in cream. "Oh, don't you worry about Cyd. She'll help." </p><p>"All right," said Taylor doubtfully, looking up at the sign which she'd hung just last week: </p><p> </p><p>Swift Investigations: </p><p>Swift Assistance Is Our Assurance. </p><p> </p><p>and wondered if it was already hanging just a bit crooked. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Thomas cradled the telephone in the crook of his arm, smoothing out the tracing over his desk set. </p><p>"Swift Investigations, Miss Swift here."</p><p>"Miss Swift," he said, and then ran completely out of things to say at the thought that she was there, on the phone, talking to him on this <em>very</em> warm and rainy summer night, with all the town enrobed in a wet golden mist. The frogs were really going at it outside his window. </p><p>"Mister Hiddleston," she said, in a questioning tone, and he realized he had absolutely no idea how long she'd been saying his name for.</p><p>"Yes!"</p><p>"Are you all right?"</p><p>"Yes—yes—I'm fine. How are you?"</p><p>"I'm fine," she said, the traces of a smile in her voice. "Did you have a reason to call me?"</p><p>"Oh! Yes. I've met with my colleague about your drawing, you see."</p><p>"Have you?"</p><p>"Yes. And she thinks that it may be an incompletely remembered guild emblem."</p><p>"A what?"</p><p>"A guild emblem. Don't you have those in America?"</p><p>"I don't think so."</p><p>"Oh—then think of it as an order of tradesmen. Say you have a group of potters. And they wish to identify their work, make it recognizable as the product of a skilled group of craftsmen. So they come up with a stamp, a very complicated stamp difficult for any old blighter with a stylus to replicate, and they put that seal on every pot and cup and jar they make, usually right on the bottom. And that serves as a sort of countermeasure against counterfeit. Only guild craftsmen who've been trained by the guild get to use it." </p><p>"So, my seal might instead be a union symbol."</p><p>"In a sense, yes."</p><p>"But a union for what?"</p><p>"That's just the question, isn't it? It could be a number of things. Cooks, perhaps?"</p><p>Miss Swift's voice sounded doubtful. "My grandma once set a jelly on fire." </p><p>"Oh," said Thomas, rather deflated. </p><p>"It was an apricot jelly."</p><p>"That <em>would</em> be rather trying."</p><p>"Apparently my grandfather used to go down to the gas station to get his steaks cooked properly, in secret."</p><p>"Oh dear."</p><p>"They usually had a hot radiator or two that you could slip a piece of meat onto."</p><p>"How... colorful," Thomas said doubtfully. </p><p>"My aunt once got distracted by a solar eclipse and scrambled an egg with the shell. Oh, and my mother learned how to cook from my grandmother, and once she mistook the borax for the baking soda and nearly poisoned the whole family!" </p><p>Thomas briefly perked up, then deflated just as quickly at the realization that Miss Swift was unlikely to be charmed by a suitor who had nearly poisoned himself in his own kitchen.</p><p>"And I think once I accidentally may have abandoned an apartment with an entire quart of milk sitting in the fridge," Miss Swift concluded, sounding rather like a woman wondering if she left the stove on. </p><p>"So if I catch your drift..." Thomas said, and she giggled, a lovely sound, a sound he wished he had on a phonograph record so he could play it whenever it snowed. </p><p>"Not a family of talented cooks, no. We are a talented family of ordering carry-out." </p><p>"And a noble skill it is," said Thomas. "I myself have only to glance at a carry-out menu before being stricken with a kind of hopeless paralysis."</p><p>"Oh, I haven't ever got that problem," said Miss Swift cheerfully. "I know exactly what I want, and I know it when I see it. The tragedy is how rarely what I want appears on the menu." </p><p>"Is that so? Well, that is a... tragedy," Thomas said, stupidly, watching her serve fly past, heavy with topspin, into the weeds beyond the court. </p><p>Miss Swift, apparently, found playing against a rank amateur amusing, and giggled once again.  "It <em>is</em>. Truly, it is. They'll write ballads about my suffering once I'm gone. Long ones!"</p><p>"Well, we can't have that," Thomas said, locating some long-hidden reserve of decisiveness, possibly in the same deep pit he'd chucked such boarding-school torments as 'a stiff upper lip' and 'interest in cricket'. "You must allow me to take you out to lunch again. We will make an adventure of it. Blackpool?"</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"I can't believe there are so many tiny villages here," Miss Swift said. She'd been pressed up against the broad window of the bus, her expression rapt, for the better part of the trip, exclaiming over routine items like hedgerows and stiles and water wheels. And yet, her beguiling enthusiasm was contagious; through her eyes, Thomas saw the drab scenery of the North transformed. "It's like Beatrix Potter," she said, "All alleyways and tiny coves—I want to make the bus driver stop so I can explore every one. What's that?"</p><p>"That's an apiary. Look, you can see the bees if you look against the white of the boxes."</p><p>"Oh! Do you think that they wear the beekeper's costumes, you know, with the white helmets and everything?"</p><p>"I'd imagine so," said Thomas around a smile as she craned to peer at the apiary until it was out of sight, then settled back into her chair with a slightly wistful sigh. </p><p>"When I left Pennsylvania I only wanted to see the city. If it didn't have lights and cars and lots of action, I wasn't interested. And Nashville was like that, but I still wanted more. So, New York. And now I'm here, surrounded by all this beautiful countryside, and I can't help but think..."</p><p>"That you desperately miss the honking and the spotlights?"</p><p>She cackled, a shockingly loud and happy sound that caused no less than three elderly passengers to turn around and frown at her over their spectacles. "No, you impossible man! No," she said, placing her hand, delicate in its dotted-lace glove, on his arm. "I was thinking that maybe, in leaving, I missed out on something." Her eyes were very wide.</p><p>Thomas felt his mind go blank, in the way it did when confronted with things like cathedrals and high waterfalls and the Italian opera. And, increasingly, Miss Swift. It was less an absence than a presence of something numinous and grand that washed away his words and left him as blank and empty and clean as a new pot, lifted scalding from kiln ash. </p><p>"I..." he said, meaning<em> I am glad you've come here to find it</em> and <em>please let it be me</em> and <em>I would be happy to follow you anywhere </em>and thankfully being interrupted by the arrival of the drinks trolley, which announced itself by ramming into his elbow. A brief loss of human cognition later, Thomas found himself being tended to by Miss Swift, who had wrapped a parcel of ice up in her handkerchief and was gently pressing it to his elbow. </p><p>"You are marvelous," he said without thinking, and she froze, her eyes locked on his—then the train hissed to a stop in some godforsaken suburb of Stoke-on-Trent, and the seats jarred, and the moment was lost. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"And then what?"</p><p>"And then we had a perfectly lovely midafternoon ramble in Blackpool," said Thomas, sprawled in a rather threadbare armchair in his flat, looking up at the ceiling. </p><p>"A ramble," said Ms. Thompson. "I daren't ask if you made so bold as to kiss her. I know you to well to do anything but despair of the answer." </p><p>"Come now, Ms. Thompson," said Thomas. "Do you think I would be so crude as to boast about it if I had?"</p><p>Ms. Thompson snorted. "If you kissed <em>her</em>? You'd be crowing it from the rooftops."</p><p>"You're right," Thomas admitted. "She did give me several very charming giggles."</p><p>There was a long and ominous silence from the other end of the line. Then, "Do you know, I sometimes have cause to wonder about you."</p><p>"How so?"</p><p>"I hope you’re aware that you <em>could</em> tell me if you were a homosexual. You know that it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference to me," said Ms. Thompson. Then, after a considering silence, she added, "Well. I might ask you to have a look at my guest bathroom, tell me if the wallpaper is common." </p><p>"I would tell you," Thomas said. "And that wallpaper is ghastly. One hardly need be a homosexual to see that."</p><p>Ms. Thompson snorted and hung up on him. He placed the receiver gently back in its cradle and folded his hands over his sternum, continuing his silent examination of the ceiling, yellow in lamplight and squiggling with the windowpane's currents of rain. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The ringing phone woke Taylor rather earlier than she liked—which, on Saturdays, was before noon. </p><p>"Whooizzit?" she mumbled from under a mazy curtain of blonde hair, not bothering to open her eyes. From the twin bed on the other side of the blue paisley curtain that divided the small flat, Karlie groaned and turned over--she hated to wake even more than Taylor did. </p><p>"Miss Swift. Did I wake you?" Cyd's tones, clear and crisp and somehow radiating disapproval, came down the line. </p><p>"Wha, no," said Taylor unconvincingly. "What time is it?"</p><p>"It is eleven thirty seven AM," Cyd reported crisply. "And I have been on shift for two and a half hours." </p><p>"Cyd? How can I help you?" said Taylor, sitting up. From behind the divider, she heard Miss Kloss sigh heavily, the signal that she was giving up hope of sleep as well. </p><p>"Well, you can call your client and advise her to get divorced," said Cyd. "Because her husband and Doctor Gottwald are planning to have her committed." </p><p>"What?!" cried Taylor, rocketing out of bed as Karlie's tousled head appeared above the paisley curtain. <em>What?</em> she mouthed.</p><p>"<em>Doctor Gottwald is conspiring to have his patients committed??</em>" Taylor shrieked, earning a shocked expression from Karlie and a "I'm afraid so" from Cyd. </p><p>"And that's not the worst of it," said Cyd. "There are others."</p><p>"What do you mean?"</p><p>"Four other women in town are in similar danger," said Cyd. "And one is worse off than Jessie. She is scheduled to be taken in today." </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>"And you are absolutely certain that Miss—what was her name again? Damn!" Thomas said as, trying to button his shirtsleeve and put on his shoe at the same time, he dropped the phone receiver. When he picked it up again, Miss Swift's voice was increasingly wild: </p><p>"—and if we don't get over there right now, she'll be taken in with no lawyer and no hope of rescue!"</p><p>"Shit," Thomas swore, with feeling, and dropped the receiver for good, barreling out the door of his apartment and not even bothering to close it behind him. He met Taylor and Miss Kloss outside the door of the florist's. Both looked panicked, and much less polished than usual—Miss Kloss was not wearing hose, and Miss Swift had buttoned her pink plaid coat wrong.</p><p>"It occurred to me on the way over," he said, somewhat out of breath, "That none of us are lawyers."</p><p>"That occurred to me too," said Miss Kloss, "Which is why I've phoned one and asked him to come and meet us there." </p><p>"Do you think he'll help us and not the husband?" said Thomas. </p><p>"He should," said Miss Kloss, hailing a cab. "He's my father." </p><p>As they all piled into the back of the cab, Thomas muttered to Miss Swift, "Your friend is <em>very</em> well connected."</p><p>"Of course she is," responded Miss Swift. "She was a Manchester Cotton Queen for two years running." </p><p>"And mentored three successive Cotton Queens," added Miss Kloss, handing the driver a two-pound note. "Quite quickly, please."</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Mrs. John Mayer was indeed in trouble—when the cab arrived, she was already in a pitched battle with her husband, who had apparently decided that the best way to coax his wife to accompany him to the hospital was to pack a bag for her, framing it as a "vacation" for her "delicate nerves". Mrs. Mayer, whose first name was Vanessa, was not too delicate to pitch the suitcase out a second story window and into a birdbath below, but apparently he'd gotten rather nasty just before the cab arrived and Vanessa was pale and shaken when she answered the door. When Miss Kloss explained the brief overview of the situation to her, she turned even paler and looked ready to faint—then Mr. Mayer came down the stairs and took great umbrage at the presence of interlopers in his marriage, umbrage which Thomas intercepted in the form of a right cross to the eye socket. Then the police arrived at the same time as Miss Kloss's father, and everything became quite shouty for several minutes as issues of rights and warrants and medical powers of attorney were debated and Miss Kloss hunted in the kitchen for an icepick. In the chaos, Taylor took Mrs. Mayer's hand and sat with her on the sofa, drawing the young woman into quiet confidence. With his one good eye, Thomas noticed how beautifully she set Vanessa at ease, comforting the young woman's shattered nerves and even drawing out a small, heartbreakingly lovely smile. Then Miss Kloss came back into the living room with a cheesecloth full of ice in one hand and the icepick in the other, Mr. Mayer pretended to be greatly alarmed by her "threatening attitude", and the tide of police and judicial opinion began to shift in favor of the interlopers, especially when Miss Kloss declared that "the ice is for Mister Thomas's eye, you nancing great wanker." </p><p> </p><p>"I think I would like a barrister," Vanessa piped up from the couch. The room fell silent. </p><p>"Good choice," said Taylor, patting her new friend's hand. </p><p>"May I suggest my dad?" said Miss Kloss. "He's right here and he's already very cross with this wanker." </p><p>"Darling, how would you even pay for a barrister," said Mr. Mayer. "You've never worked a day in your—."</p><p>"He'll do it for free," said Miss Kloss, glaring daggers at Mr. Mayer. </p><p>Vanessa looked hopefully at Mr. Kloss, who gave her a dignified nod.</p><p>"<em>Wonderful</em> choice," said Taylor, gripping her new friend's hand even tighter.</p><p>"This is all a misunderstanding," said Mr. Mayer. </p><p>"The thing about misunderstandings," said Mr. Kloss, "Is that they are much harder to sort out when one of the parties is incarcerated in a mental institution. That has a way of obscuring the true problem. Which I suspect, my dear, is that you have married a cad," he added as an aside to Vanessa. "Now, did that suitcase which he packed for you include any actual items you'd want to have? I have a daughter who, she assures me, does not live in total squalor. The flat should do for the time being. Until we can sort out this misunderstanding, that is." </p><p>"It was full of dresses, no hose nor heels," said Vanessa. </p><p>Mr. Kloss eyed Mr. Mayer with a deep misgiving. It was a look that said "wanker" all on its own. </p><p>"Go and get your things," he said to Mrs. Mayer. "Get everything you'd like to take from this house. I would not entrust Mr. Mayer with the conscientious custody of your possessions." </p><p>"I'll come with you," said Taylor. </p><p>"I'm staying right here with this wanker," said Karlie, resting her icepick in a cocky attitude on her shoulder. </p><p>Mr. Kloss closed his eyes in a pained manner. "My darling, you are a fern and a faun and a flower. Your spirit does you credit and your deeds make me proud."</p><p>"Thank you, daddy."</p><p>"And your language could melt tar."</p><p>"Thank you, daddy." </p><p>"Please spit out the gum."</p><p>"Sorry, daddy." Miss Kloss spit the gum out, without ever taking her eyes off Mr. Mayer, who was beginning, gratifyingly, to look a bit pale himself. </p><p>"I can't think. I'm panicking. What if I forget something and he burns it? I have to get all the pictures."</p><p>"Shh, calm down," said Taylor, patting Vanessa's shoulder soothingly. "I'll help you. Let's put all your suitcases on the bed. We'll pack everything important in them and my friends can help carry anything left over."</p><p>"Thank you," whispered Vanessa.</p><p>"It's nothing. Here, we'll put your pictures between your clothes. That way we don't have to spend time wrapping them but the glass will be protected. Do you have any albums or mementos you want from this bedroom?"</p><p>"May I be of service?" Thomas stood in the doorway. </p><p>"Thank you," Taylor said warmly, "I think we've got this room. Vanessa darling, did you have a hope chest? He can box it up for you."</p><p>"Yes. It had a whole service of Royal Chelsea Blue? And one half-service of Dubarry. I was collecting."</p><p>"I'll get right on it," said Thomas. He got all the way down the stairs before realizing that he had no idea what he was supposed to be looking for. "Does anyone in this room know what a service of Royal Chelsea Blue or Dubarry might be?"</p><p>Silence greeted his question, a silence that stretched on for several moments until Miss Kloss let out a great sigh of contempt. <em>"Really? </em>They're <em>china</em> <em>patterns</em>, you idiots. Come with me," she said to Thomas, abandoning Mr. Mayer to the supervision of Mr. Kloss and heading into the kitchen, where she threw open the cupboards and pointed to the stacks of blue and white china that were there. "That. That's Royal Chelsea Blue. Box up everything with that pattern on it, I'll get the silverware wrapped up. Here's a newspaper, use it between every plate." </p><p>"Thank you, Miss Kloss," said Thomas. "I really can't tell you how lost we'd be without you right now."</p><p>Miss Kloss snorted—a lovely, unladylike sound—and continued hunting through the cabinets. "You'd be buggered without my dad and my cousin, that's for sure."</p><p>"No, Miss Kloss," Thomas said, catching her elbow and stopping her. "Without <em>you</em>. You are..." he struggled for the words. "You are the girl who keeps the kettle on." </p><p>Her brow crinkled quizzically, so he continued. </p><p>"There are some people who, when disaster strikes, lose their heads entirely, and some people who sit down and draw up a plan of attack, and some people whose only concern is to preserve this or that agenda and, you, you are the person who, when disaster looms and, and terrible things are happening all around, you go and put the kettle on. Because no matter what, people will need hot water, and, and tea. People will need practical things. And that is why you are the most valuable person to have in an emergency, and a very treasured friend of Miss Swift, and an... admired acquaintance of mine." He trailed off rather lamely, aware he had been speechifying, and his hand dropped to his side. </p><p>"Cor," said Miss Kloss. "Bet you wish you could say a mouthful like that to Miss Swift."</p><p>Thomas gave a hopeless shrug. </p><p>"There there, I'm sure it'll come in time," Miss Kloss commiserated. "That were a real good rehearsal. Now, stop stalling and go wrap up that china. That Mr. Mayer reminds me of a dead thing an' I'm not spendin' another minute more than I have to in his house." </p><p>"Agreed," muttered Thomas, and they spent a very companionable ten minutes wrapping up Mrs. Mayer's possessions and loading them into Mr. Kloss's Triumph Dolomite. Miss Swift accompanied Mrs. Mayer and her suitcases into the back of the Dolomite, and Thomas, Miss Kloss, and Mr. Kloss all crowded into the front, which made gear changes rather trying. </p><p>"Where to, daughter?" said Mr. Kloss. "Hopefully not<em> very </em>far?"</p><p>"Let's go to the flat," said Miss Kloss. "We'll get you all set up," she informed Vanessa, turning and kneeling backwards on the front seat as both Thomas and Mr. Kloss winced at the elbowing they were getting. "Miss Swift and I aren't hardly ever at home, you'll have the run of the place while we're out and plenty of privacy until you can get set up with a job and your own place. Do you like phones?" </p><p>"I suppose?"</p><p>"Good, my cousin Cyd works over at the phone company and they're always dying for girls to work the night shift and weekends. Hell on your social life but it pays good, and if you work your way up then you can takes your pick of shifts." </p><p>"Mister Hiddleston, was it?" said Mr. Kloss, gazing fixedly through the windscreen as he navigated the narrow back lane towards the western side of town. </p><p>"Yes," said Thomas, leaning forward to see Mr. Kloss around Miss Kloss's rear end. </p><p>"I want you to notice how very carefully I am <em>not</em> remarking upon my daughter's apparently active nightly social life."</p><p>"Yes, sir," said Thomas. </p><p>"This is deliberate. I have raised Karlie almost entirely on my own. She was four when we lost her mother, you understand?"</p><p>"Yes, sir." </p><p>"That meant I had to be both mother and father, and that is quite enough responsibility to be getting on with."</p><p>"I see."</p><p>"Not yet you don't, but you will. You see, Karlie has had to take responsibility for everything she could possibly manage since a very early age. I taught her to cook herself breakfast the moment she could reach the stove. She was managing the household books by the time she was eleven, and at fourteen she was changing the oil in the car. There's nothing my daughter can't do, because I simply wouldn't have had time to do it for her, you understand?" </p><p>"Yes, sir."</p><p>"That means I haven't had any time to conduct research on her suitors, either. Because that would be a waste of time, and an abdication of her responsibility. My daughter must do this for herself, and she holds people to a much stricter standard than I do. After all, I'm a lawyer. I deal with criminals all day. Not you, darling, you're lovely," he added over his shoulder to Vanessa. "It's actually your husband to which I'm referring. Conspiracy to commit medical fraud is very serious indeed, we'll see that he pays for it. Where was I?"</p><p>"I believe you were mentioning your daughter's very astute eye for character," said Thomas, aware that, in the backseat, Miss Swift had grown ominously silent. He snuck a glimpse in the rearview mirror, but her face, obscured by the reflections of trees and sky in the Triumph's window, revealed nothing. </p><p>"Indeed I was. As I was saying, she has to ask her own questions and conduct her own investigations of a person's character. Which is part of the reason I am so very glad," concluded Mr. Kloss, pulling up to the curbstones outside the florist's, "That she has fallen in with Miss Swift. A more discerning pair of women can scarcely be imagined. Mrs. Mayer, you are in good hands. I'm going to draw up the beginnings of your divorce proceedings and a good sturdy defense for the medical claim your husband is almost certain to make against you in court. It should take me about a day or two. Try not to worry too much in between now and then," he said, stepping out of the car to open the rear doors. "I'll be in touch once it's time to walk you through the finer details."</p><p>"Thank you," whispered Mrs. Mayer, stepping out of the car with some difficulty, as she was hampered by many suitcases. </p><p>"Shall I help you carry your things up?"</p><p>"Oh, no, daddy, I think we can manage from here. Let us take her. You'll need to get back to the office," said Karlie smoothly, taking her father's elbow and steering him a few steps away from the others. "An' not for nothing, but it's <em>Miss Swift </em>that Mister Thomas has eyes for, not me."</p><p>"Yes, darling," said Mr. Kloss. "And, had I not introduced an element of confusion on that point, how much longer do you think it would have taken him to <strong><em>do</em></strong> something about it?" </p><p>They both looked over their shoulders at the car. Mister Thomas, in a positive agony of muted expression, was trying to assist Miss Swift with two separate suitcases while simultaneously helping her out of the car, relieving her of a hatbox, and, in a gesture of helpless romantic woe, tucking away a stray ringlet which had escaped from under her pinned hat. </p><p>Karlie turned back to her father. "I still have so much to learn, don't I?"</p><p>He winked at her. "Try not to despair. You're learning from the best." </p><p>"And so modest," she teased, standing up on her tiptoes to kiss him on his bristly cheek. "I love you, daddy."</p><p>"Love you too, piglet," he said, getting back in the car. "Don't let your cousin terrorize Miss Vanessa, she's been through an ordeal."</p><p>"I won't."</p><p>"Bye bye," he said, and carefully reversed the Triumph back up the tiny alley towards his practice. Karlie stood and watched him go, the way she had every morning in childhood. Then she went upstairs to put the kettle on for tea. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The way it worked was this: Doctor Gottwald had acquired a bit of a reputation, early in his practice, as being very loose with the prescription pad when it came to wives, and their nerves, and husbands who wanted something to soothe their wives' nerves. </p><p>"Absolutely none of which is technically illegal, by the way," Mr. Kloss added over brandied tea, late at night in the florists' office which had become their de facto war cabinet. Cyd and Ms. Thompson had come to join the conference, bringing both biscuits and moral indignation. "A physician has a perfect right to treat a patient any way he sees fit, and the judicial system recognizes the authority of a husband to report the symptoms of his wife to a physician. In that respect, she is still treated much as a child, and can be diagnosed independent of her consent to an examination." </p><p>However, Doctor Gottwald's practice did not stop there. Soon, he was offering husbands various means to pacify their wives without their wives' knowledge or consent—dissolvable pills, colorless powders, and tasteless liquid "soothers" flew off his shelves, "and that," said Mr. Kloss, holding a finger in the air, "is where he has stepped over the line that His Majesty's judicial system has, in its infinite wisdom, decided to draw. You may diagnose a woman without her consent, but you may not drug her without it, and by explicitly mentioning the dissolvable, colorless, and tasteless properties of his drugs, Doctor Gottwald has made it clear that his drugs are perfect for just such a covert purpose. However, we're going to have a devil of a time proving it."</p><p>"How so?" asked Thomas. </p><p>"Because we can't prove an insinuation," Miss Swift answered for him. "All the doctor has to say is that he didn't mean it that way."</p><p>"You are aptly named, Miss Swift," said Mr. Kloss. "All he needs to do is to say he had no idea a man would take the other meaning. He could claim that the drugs are colorless so as not to stain clothing if they are spilled; that they are tasteless so as not to offend."</p><p>"That they are dissolvable so that you can take them in your morning tea," said Ms. Thompson, her knuckles quite white around a teaspoon. Thomas had tried, several times, to discreetly signal Miss Swift that she ought to remove fragile china from the vicinity, to no avail. Miss Swift seemed determined to engage Ms. Thompson in the plan to rescue Doctor Gottwald's many female patients, and in Ms. Thompson she had found a more than eager participant.</p><p>"The real crux of our case, therefore, will be to show beyond the shadow of a doubt that Dr. Gottwald was acting not in the true service of his patients, but in service of husbands who were interested not in their wives' health, but in their being quickly and cleanly gotten out of the way," said Mr. Kloss. "We can talk until we're blue in the face about drugging without consent, but it won't make a bit of difference if the courts believe that the husbands were acting in the best interests of their wives' mental serenity. We must, and I am quite deadly serious here, we must find motives. And that means—"</p><p>"Further investigation," said Miss Swift, finishing Mr. Kloss's thought for him. "We have to find out why they want their wives committed, out of the way."</p><p>"Indeed," said Mr. Kloss. "Do they have mistresses? Do they stand to gain financially? <em>Cui bono, </em>in other words." </p><p>"I can help with that," said Cyd. "Cigarette breaks at the phone company, all the girls talk about is who's having an affair with who around town."</p><p>"How long will it take you to find out about all five of our rogue husbands, do you think?" asked Mr. Kloss. </p><p>"Four days," said Cyd. Everyone around the table looked at her. "There are three shifts," she said. "I work seven to three tomorrow, three to eleven the next two days. I won't work the eleven to seven and get to talk to those girls until Friday." </p><p>"You have a first-rate mind for efficiency, my dear," said Mr. Kloss, and Cyd nodded. "Now, how else can we catch these loathsome cads?"</p><p>"I... may have a way," said Ms. Thompson.</p><p>There followed a brief, muttered conversation between Ms. Thompson and Thomas that the rest of the table strained to hear. "Are you sure? You don't have to. No one would ask you to," said Thomas. </p><p>"I know no one would, and that is precisely why it must be me," said Ms. Thompson, then turned to the table at large. "My estranged son is the local ordinary. If any of these men have decided to seek annulment of their marriages, that documentation would be on file in his office. I could pay him a visit."</p><p>"Your estranged son," repeated Mr. Kloss delicately. </p><p>"Yes," said Ms. Thompson. Seeing that the table awaited further explanation, she shifted a bit awkwardly in her chair. "I am... divorced. My son rather took issue with it. He believes my divorce to be illegitimate, in the eyes of the Lord."</p><p>Miss Swift's mouth made a silent "Oh" as her hand, almost involuntarily, shot out to pat Mrs Thompson's shoulder in a caring way as the older woman composed herself. Thomas shot her a grateful look. </p><p>"It's all right," said Ms. Thompson. "He has made his choices in life and I have made mine. It's too late for us to mend it. But it's not too late for me to help these women, and if talking to my son helps us build our case, then that's what I must do."</p><p>"Ms. Thompson, you are an astonishing woman," said Mr. Kloss. "I'm quite glad to make your acquaintance." </p><p>"Well, don't go putting out the bunting just yet," said Ms. Thompson, flustered and patting at a spot where her hair was loosening from its pin moorings. "We have yet to learn if he'll even agree to see me, much less allow me to go sniffing through the church books."</p><p>"Could I perhaps offer assistance with the sniffing?" asked Miss Swift. "I'm told I have a particularly sharp nose." </p><p>"That she does," added Karlie. "I've seen her find false bottoms in three different dresser drawers."</p><p>Thomas privately thought that "false bottom" would apply wonderfully as an epithet to Ms. Thompson's son. But aloud, he said simply, "What can we do to help?"</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>As it turned out, Ms. Thompson required a ride to Coventry Cathedral, which Mr. Kloss was all too happy to provide. Thomas and Miss Swift sat in the Dolomite's backseat, keeping very quiet and trying not to disturb what they both sensed might be a budding regard in the front seat. It was a beautiful Monday morning, the countryside very much wetted down with dew, and Miss Swift had chosen a soft blue eyelet dress which made her look like a girl of sixteen, not the sharply sophisticated young lady she was. Thomas caught himself staring at the exact same instant that she did--this time, however, instead of jumping guiltily or looking away, he held her gaze as they sat, jouncing and swaying with the movement of the Dolomite, for several miles. When finally, she did break their mutual gaze and turned to look out the window, Thomas saw that her color had risen quite through her cheeks; then he saw her hand, stretched out like an offering across the maroon leather seats. He took it, and the rest of the trip to Coventry was a blur. </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Ms. Thompson’s son was curly-haired, broad of shoulder, and possessed of the type of care-worn, lightly crinkled eyes that instantly put people at ease. Everything about his appearance, from his simple black garb to his gentle mien, radiated warmth and human kindness.</p><p>Then he spoke.</p><p>“Oh. It’s <em>you</em>.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson, looking uncharacteristically meek, wrung her hands a bit. Even from behind, Thomas could see Mr. Kloss’s posture stiffen.</p><p>“Hello, Tristan,” Ms. Thompson said. “It’s been a long time.”</p><p>“Has it,” said Tristan. “What do you want, I’ve got the Liturgy of the Hours in five minutes.”</p><p>“Careful there,” said Mr. Kloss, so mildly that everyone in the group heard it, then wondered if they had heard correctly. Several heads turned to look at Mr. Kloss, whose eyes were fixed very steadily on Ms. Thompson’s son. Tristan looked the lawyer over, then returned his gaze to his mother. “Who’s this then?”</p><p>“This is Mr. Kloss, an attorney,” said Ms. Thompson. “We’ve come up against a rather nasty piece of work whom we suspect of having drugged several women, and—”</p><p>“Stop,” said Tristan. “I’ll hear no more about this sordid little drama you’ve found to entangle yourself with. This isn’t your concern, it’s certainly not mine, and more to the point it’s not the Church’s.”</p><p>“It is if the Church has been deceived,” said Mr. Kloss evenly.</p><p>Tristan paused. “How’s that?”</p><p>“We believe the women in question to be wives whose husbands wish to leave them,” said Mr. Kloss. “As the women are of sound mind, the drugs are meant to introduce the question of insanity, thus giving their husbands false grounds upon which to seek annulments.”</p><p>Tristan pinched his nose between thumb and forefinger. “I haven’t got time for this,” he announced. “Listen, you do as you like. Go through the records, speak to the church secretary, but whatever you do, leave me out of it. I’ve got to go.” With that, he pushed his way through the group and headed away in high dudgeon towards the new cathedral. Ms. Thompson visibly pulled herself together.</p><p>“There,” she said, attempting cheer, “That wasn’t so bad. Now, let’s go find the annulment records.”</p><p>As Thomas and Miss Swift mounted the steps behind their companions, both noticed Mr. Kloss’s hand, hovering just over Ms. Thompson’s shoulder, as if wanting to shield her. Miss Swift gave Thomas a speaking glance; then they were inside the cool plastered darkness of the priory. It smelt of mineral water and new paint; pigeons’ wings echoed against the arched roof. Even under tense circumstances, it was a very peaceful place. Thomas felt Miss Swift’s cool white hand, slipping back into his in the dim privacy of the sacred room.</p><p>“Thomas and I will go and speak to the church secretary,” he heard her say. “Ms. Thompson and Mr. Kloss, will you see if there’s any kind of a petition record in the library?” The suggestion was greeted with general assent, and Miss Swift pulled him away towards the north end of the library; however, before she reached the door, she took an abrupt step sideways into a tiny reading alcove, pulling Thomas with her. Her slim cool hands slid over his face, and then everything was the rich velvet of her mouth, and the sweet urgency that sent ripples coursing down every nerve. He felt haloed with the sensation, like the kiss was radiating outward, bathing all the dimly lit bookshelves with warm lamplight. When it ended, Miss Swift pulled away with the most delectable reluctance, a tiny frown line appearing near her brow as she pursed her lips, seeming to relish the last traces of taste. "That was..." Thomas said.</p><p>"Extraordinary," said Miss Swift. </p><p>"Yes, extraordinary, extraordinary is a good word for it," Thomas agreed, feeling as if he'd become a gargoyle for babble, words running uncontrollably out of his mouth. </p><p>Miss Swift's eyes twinkled with merriment. “Let’s go catch a bad husband.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Damn it,” announced Mr. Kloss as he closed another filing cabinet drawer. Hearing himself, he guiltily glanced up at the vaulted ceiling of the church library. “Sorry.”</p><p>“Did I just see you apologize to a ceiling?” Ms. Thompson said, setting a large archival box on the tabletop with a heavy whumph.</p><p>“Afraid so,” said Mr. Kloss. “The habits of belief are trickier to eradicate than the belief itself, it would seem.”</p><p>“You were devout?” asked Ms. Thompson.</p><p>“Once, yes,” said Mr. Kloss. “As any schoolboy raised to believe without reason. I had a fine singing voice and I believe my parents thought if I participated in choir, some of the holiness might rub off.”</p><p>“And did it?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss’s eyes crinkled. “’Course not. I became an attorney.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson tried to hide her grin by aiming it at the paper she held in her hands. But, as she registered the words on the paper, her warm smile faded.</p><p>“What is it?” asked Mr. Kloss.</p><p>“It’s a denied annulment,” said Ms. Thompson briskly. “Not for one of our poor dears, I’m afraid. Some other unfortunate from…” here, she checked the date. “Two years ago. We’re getting closer.”</p><p>“What is the reason given?” asked Mr. Kloss.</p><p>“Does it matter?” said Ms. Thompson, putting the paper back and closing the lid decisively. “She wanted to leave and was prevented. Here, help me reach the next box up, I think that may be our winner.” Just as Mr. Kloss came around the table and began to assist her, they were interrupted by a tremendous clattering as Miss Swift came running back into the room, waving a piece of paper over her head, Thomas right on her heels.</p><p>“I’ve found it! I’ve found it!”</p><p>“What have you found, child?” said Ms. Thompson, in a state of perfect agitation.</p><p>“Look, look here,” said Miss Swift, stabbing at the unfolded paper. “Husband’s petition for nullity, dated three weeks ago, signed by Mr. Mayer.”</p><p>“Bloody Nora!” exclaimed Mister Kloss, before (once again) remembering where he was. “Sorry. My dears, this is excellent. Were there perchance any others?”</p><p>“No, unfortunately,” said Thomas. “The only husband on our list who visited in the last six months was Mr. Mayer.”</p><p>“But it’s one down, four to go!” exclaimed Miss Swift.</p><p>“Indeed, and there’s the ticket. Miss Swift, with your attitude we’ll have this doctor discredited by sundown.”</p><p>Miss Swift beamed up at Thomas, clearly pleased as punch with herself, and Thomas once again felt himself overwhelmed with tenderness for the brash American, so different from himself. Thomas had had his triumphs before; last year, he’d recovered a baronet of Edgbaston from historical oblivion and guaranteed his descendants a small but tidy bit of property. Two years prior, he’d discovered a christening record that helped settle a grazing dispute with roots reaching back to the time of William’s invasion. He had presented a monograph to the Cradley Historical Society on the importance and interpretation of signatory rings. Once, he had gotten a pregnant tabby out of a storm drain. And yet, nothing he’d ever done seemed terribly important, now, compared with the mission Miss Swift had uncovered. She was right, Thomas thought. What had he been thinking, spending his life agonizing over crumbling pieces of paper?</p><p> </p><p>They crowded into the Dolomite and began the trip back in considerably higher spirits than before. While, in the front seat, Mr. Kloss struck up a lively conversation with Ms. Thompson about the many types of love notes that are admissible in court (including tree carvings and messages sent via the old Victorian language of flowers), Thomas and Miss Swift tried in vain to behave according to the rules of tennis, which state that spectators must not applaud.</p><p>“It’s incredible, it’s like a master class,” muttered Thomas out of the corner of his mouth to an increasingly jubilant Miss Swift, who was clinging deliciously to his arm.</p><p>“I’ve never heard anything like it!” she agreed in a near-hysterical whisper. “Please, can he come to America and give lessons?”</p><p>“Watch, watch,” said Thomas as Mr. Kloss deftly referenced a fascinating case involving a set of lovers who corresponded entirely through annotation. “He’s going to turn the conversation to libraries.”</p><p>“In fact, the two concealed nearly seven months’ worth of increasingly ardent communiques in an old set of encyclopedias in their local library,” said Mr. Kloss, and Miss Swift let out a stifled squeak as she dug her nails deep into Thomas’s forearm.</p><p>“Really?” said Ms. Thompson. “I should love to see that.”</p><p>“They are still on display at Warwickshire,” said Mr. Kloss. “I should be happy to accompany you and provide background to the tale.”</p><p>Now it was Thomas’s turn to bat frantically at Miss Swift’s arm.</p><p>“I should be very pleased indeed to be chaperoned,” said Ms. Thompson. “I once got so engrossed in the death rolls at Warwickshire that they nearly turned out the lights on me.”</p><p>“Then I shall coax you out at closing time with the promise of drinks and dinner,” said Mr. Kloss decisively, and Miss Swift’s head flew back in a silent thrill of elation. “Thursday afternoon?”</p><p>“Thursday afternoon it is,” agreed Ms. Thompson, and they were back in Stafford, pulling to a halt outside Ms. Thompson’s whitewashed garden gate.</p><p>“Thank you, all,” Ms. Thompson said, “For an absolutely lovely afternoon. Now I’m going to go listen to the news, against my better judgement.”</p><p>A chorus of goodbyes followed Ms. Thompson, and Mr. Kloss drove all the way around the corner before looking in the rearview and saying, “I take it you are both satisfied?”</p><p>“Oh, tremendously,” said Miss Swift. “Please tell me you will wear your most dashing tie on Thursday?”</p><p>“I’m a barrister, all my ties are dashing,” said Mr. Kloss, and Miss Swift made a giddy little yelp of pleasure.</p><p>“Oh, I can’t wait for Thursday! Please, you must let us know how it goes, you simply <em>must</em>.”</p><p>Mr. Kloss smiled indulgently. “A gentleman never tells, but as Karlie’s father and Cyd’s uncle, I can tell you that I have long since given up any illusions of privacy in this town.” He pulled to a stop outside the florist’s. “Which is why I shall be taking her to Boaton’s, where we can be assured at least of a good cream tea while we’re being watched.”</p><p>“Good choice,” said Thomas.</p><p>“Have a wonderful time,” said Miss Swift warmly, patting Mr. Kloss on the shoulder as they slid out of the back of the Dolomite. They watched the black car pull away from the curb and pause before turning around the corner, and Thomas reflected that there is no silence quite so delectable as the first moment of silence when a new couple are left alone together. Miss Swift turned towards him. “I would invite you up…” she said.</p><p>“But you have a Miss Kloss and a Mrs. Mayer upstairs monitoring our every moment,” finished Thomas for her. “Do you think they are watching us right this moment?”</p><p>Miss Swift did not shift her direct gaze. “Would it change your behavior if they were?”</p><p>Oh, hang it. “Not a bit,” Thomas said truthfully, stepped forward and kissed her, her sleek, soft hair like silk pouring through his hands, her hungry little mouth opening under his for the second time today. Nothing about Miss Swift was even remotely decorous or reticent—she kissed with the same voracious greed with which she took in experiences, nudging her way directly into Thomas’s arms and cozying her long, slim frame up against him as if she’d always been there. Her tongue was tart with the coffee she imbibed like air, curling around his in a way that would have been considered quite obscene by all the nice British girls he’d dated before. Thomas was beginning to wonder <em>why</em> he had dated so many nice British girls. After several long and breathless moments, she pulled away, her lipstick blurred as if in a hasty photograph; Thomas had the wild thought that if he let this woman go, he would spent the rest of his life regretting it. Just as he opened his mouth to say something like, <em>marry me,</em> she opened her mouth and said, “Why don’t we go back to your place?”</p><p>Thomas almost said something like, <em>to my place</em>, or, <em>are you certain</em>, or, <em>will your girlfriends be much concerned</em>, when some small self-preserving fragment of him not yet completely extinguished by Britishness asserted itself very clearly and firmly by snapping his jaw shut on his tongue.</p><p>“Ow,” said Thomas, and then there was a brief interlude of tender concern from Miss Swift, and after it was thoroughly established that no damage had been done to the organ in question, Thomas said, “Yes. My place. I think that would be very good indeed.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Nggghhh. Mrrrhhh.”</p><p>China rattled, and then the sheet which had shielded Miss Swift from the morning light was pulled aside. Thomas, looking down at her, had to admit that it was not <em>quite</em> like pulling the sheet off to reveal a Botticelli.</p><p> </p><p>It was so much better than that.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Miss Swift, face concealed by a mazy tumble of hair, opened one eye and squinted balefully at the light. “<em>Mrrrrrrgggh</em>.”</p><p>Reading the yowl correctly as a protest, Thomas set down the sheet and picked up the cup and saucer he’d brought to the bedside. As Miss Swift’s one exposed eye narrowed dangerously, he hastily lowered the teacup, wafting its aroma towards her nose. The eye widened.</p><p>“Ooughghawwwwfeee,” said Miss Swift, then pushed up from the mattress, swinging one endless leg from the bed and reaching for the teacup with both hands. When she had drained the last from the bottom of the rather shallow cup, she looked up hopefully. “I don’t suppose there’s any more where that came from?”</p><p>“Erm. That was supposed to be for both of us to share,” said Thomas, then grinned at her crestfallen expression. “Silly, of course there’s more. I made a whole pot just for you. Come to the kitchen, it’s still hot.”</p><p>“Is that where you disappeared off to, so early this morning?” Miss Swift asked, wrapping a bedsheet around herself like a toga and rising to follow Thomas. “To get coffee?”</p><p>“Indeed. I’d hoped to get back before you awoke.”</p><p>“Before eight, that’s a very safe bet,” said Miss Swift, then stopped abruptly at the sight of the table. <em>“Oh.”</em> </p><p>Thomas looked at the small table, set with a paisley cloth and his (deeply mismatched) china, laden with sausages, beans, toast, blood pudding, hot coffee with cream and sugar, clotted cream, raspberry jam, scones, a tiny vase of red roses, and two soft-boiled eggs in cups. “Have I missed a crucial part of the Swiftian breakfast?”</p><p>In response, Miss Swift took his face between her hands and kissed him long and softly, letting the sheet drop in the process.</p><p>“So I’ve done well.”</p><p>“You have done splendidly, now sit down and eat with me!” said Miss Swift delightedly, seating herself and arranging the long white bedsheet about herself like the train of an empress. Before unfolding her napkin, she leaned forward and took a deep inhale of the roses, pressing them to her face. “Oh, how <em>lovely</em>. Roses in America don’t smell like this.”</p><p>“No? How do they smell?”</p><p>“Oh, still like roses, you know, but nowhere near as strong. They’re larger, but I think that breeds the scent out of them, you know?”</p><p>“A rose by any other name,” said Thomas. “I thought red might be your color.”</p><p>Miss Swift giggled charmingly. “It <em>is</em>. Now. Explain <em>everything</em> on my plate.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>After an illuminating breakfast in which the merits of beans on toast were debated and the finer points of blood pudding rhapsodized over, and an even more illuminating (and overflowing) soak in Thomas’s deep clawfoot bathtub, Miss Swift looked out of the curtains and sighed.</p><p>“We’ve got to go back out there, haven’t we?”</p><p>“I’m afraid so,” said Thomas, joining her at the window. She turned in his arms and looked up at him earnestly. “Although,” he added, watching his own fingers as he smoothed her still-damp hair behind her ears, “We could board up the door and attempt to elicit the assistance of the shopkeepers downstairs in our romantic hermitage. We could be like Christine Carpenter.”</p><p>“Who?”</p><p>“Christine, she was a famous anchorite. Did you have those in America?”</p><p>“I don’t think so.”</p><p>“Well, the practice did lose rather a lot of steam by the late sixteen hundreds. They used to plaster a holy person, a monk or a nun, up in a little cell attached to the church.”</p><p>Miss Swift’s eyes widened. Then there was a very slow, very deliberate blink. It was the blink of a Kewpie doll whom someone had just told about vivisection. “They… plastered her… <strong><em>up</em></strong>?”</p><p>“Well, yes.”</p><p>“In a <strong><em>wall?”</em></strong></p><p>“Well, it wasn’t like the cask of Amontillado, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Thomas, a bit amused. “They had holes, for food and water and the chamber pot, and a little bunk, and sometimes a little oiled-parchment window that opened onto the street, for light.”</p><p>Miss Swift blinked very rapidly. “A hole. For the chamber pot.”</p><p>“Yes, and a little window that opened into the sanctuary of the church, so the anchorite could be part of the church community. I know it sounds very lonely, but they were considered very holy and wise, and sometimes people came to them for advice.”</p><p>“And she never left? Christine…. what was her name?”</p><p>“Carpenter. She did, actually, once. She left, and then came back, and begged to be walled up again, lest she be tempted to stray further. They did, after some consideration, but they omitted the door, and made the windows very much smaller, so she couldn’t get out. And that was where she stayed, until she died.”</p><p>Miss Swift thought about it for several moments. “I think I’d like to see it.”</p><p>“What, the place where they put Christine Carpenter?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Well, Shere is about three hours away. Can we wait until this week-end?”</p><p>“I suppose, yes,” said Miss Swift. “After all, you have many other clients to tend to.” She gave him a little peck on the cheek, and a wink, and then she was gone. Leaving Thomas to wonder if he was being mocked, or flirted with, or just left far behind.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Karlie, my darling,” Taylor announced, taking off her gloves as she sashayed rather grandly into the small room above the florist’s. “Update me, quickly, tell me the scoop. Where are we on our women?”</p><p>“Oh, no no no no no,” responded Miss Kloss, coming around the small kitchen table as, from the bathroom, Mrs. Mayer emerged, drying her hands on a tea towel. “If you think for one <strong><em>minute</em></strong> that you can distract us from your gallivantings wi’ Mister Hiddleston by coming in here all lah-di-dah, what’s new girls, wi’out givin’ us a thorough report of your doings last night, leavin’ no detail out, as it were, then you have another think coming.”</p><p>“Oh, surely Mrs. Mayer isn’t interested in hearing all those very personal details,” parried Taylor, only to be foiled rather quickly by Mrs. Mayer, who quickly said: “Oh no, I’d really rather hear about this.” Catching Taylor’s hesitance, she added, “Please. I’ve been shut up in here thinking about nothing but my case, and it’s likely to drive me mad. I would love to hear about someone else’s date, please.”</p><p>Taylor melted. “Oh, all right,” she said, grinning. “Karlie, can you make us a pot of coffee, and I will tell you both about all the scandalous ways I’ve been kissed in the last twenty-four hours, starting in a church.”</p><p>A shock of rising squeals greeted her statement, and Taylor toed off her shoes and sat down to tell the story.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Ms. Thompson, as ever, was crisper.</p><p>“Thank goodness,” she said before hanging up, “I was beginning to compose an elegy for the doomed youth of England.”</p><p> </p><p>Thomas grinned ruefully at the receiver before replacing it and going to tend to his slightly flooded bathroom with a mop.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“I trust the weekend has gone well for all of you,” said Cyd, her expression giving away nothing. Across the table, Miss Swift, Mrs. Mayer, Miss Kloss, and Thomas all fought a losing battle with the giggles, until Ms. Thompson, glaring at all four of them, said, “I daresay it <em>has</em>, now let’s get to the business at hand.”</p><p>It was Wednesday, and the small gathering of women (and Thomas) above the florist’s shop had taken on rather the feeling of a war cabinet. Mr. Kloss had been called away to an urgent arbitration in Stoke Golding and had urged them not to wait: “Honestly, you’ll do a better job without me interrupting you with a thousand tedious questions.” Ms. Thompson already looked as though she regretted holding the meeting intensely, but, fixing the nib of her fountain pen firmly in the holder, she forged ahead.</p><p>“Cyd. What can you report from your friends at the switchboard.”</p><p>Cyd glanced to Vanessa on her left, just a glance, but Ms. Thompson caught its meaning. “Dear,” she said to Vanessa, “Are you sure you’d like to hear this?”</p><p>Vanessa looked startled to have been directly addressed. “Me?”</p><p>“Yes, dear. It touches pretty directly upon your husband’s… doings.”</p><p>Vanessa licked her lips. In a small voice, she said, “I know it will be… strange for you to talk about these things in front of me. But if my husband was trying to have me committed, then he wasn’t really my husband. Not really. If you can bear it, I think I should stay.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson beamed at Vanessa. “That’s the spirit, my dear. Cyd, please continue.”</p><p>“All right. Susan Marshman, Brenda Benham, and Glenys Ann Dennet all confirm that Mr. Mayer is seeing Miss Mitra, the youngest. I believe she runs the washing service on Wogan Street.”</p><p>Everyone at the table winced, except Mrs. Mayer, who paled but sat bravely upright. “Please,” she said, “Don’t feel awkward on my account. I knew there was <em>something</em>. It’s honestly a comfort to know it wasn’t all in my head.”</p><p>Cyd nodded, and continued. “Both Bertha Rumble and myself have made connections after the hour of ten P.M. between Gracie Gold’s husband Gus and a room in the boarding house on Red Lion Street.”</p><p>Miss Swift leaned over to Thomas and, out of the corner of her mouth, muttered, “Cathouse?”</p><p>Thomas nodded very solemnly.</p><p>Cyd ticked off the name in her notebook very precisely. “Bertha, Cynthia Stagg, and Lizzie Hammond confirm that Sally Timms’s husband Fred is seeing a Bette, a Petra, an Elizabeth, <em>and</em> an Alice.”</p><p>Miss Swift gasped in amazement. <em>“No!”</em></p><p>“Apparently, he has assigned them to days,” said Cyd. “With rotating weekends. He is greatly aided by his job as a traveling salesman.”</p><p>Miss Swift turned to Thomas and slapped him right in the fleshy part of the arm. <strong><em>“See? </em></strong>Ms. Thompson, if you would be so kind as to write that bit down? For the record? I want it on formal record that our most unfaithful husband is a traveling salesman.”</p><p>“Not so fast,” said Cyd. “Meet Selena, whose husband, one J. Bieber, is, according to every girl on the night shift, seeing six separate ladies employed at the aforementioned boarding house.” A slight wave of disbelief, accompanied by titters, swept through the audience, and Cyd waited for it to die down before continuing. “That leaves us with Jessie. We’ve gathered no information on her husband whatsoever. He makes no calls, beyond the occasional to his office to let them know he’s going to be late when it’s very rainy or she’s having a headache. When I asked the girls about him, they were all quite taken aback.”’</p><p>“Why’s that?” asked Miss Swift.</p><p>Cyd turned her flat, bright blue gaze on Miss Swift. “Because they are all quite enamoured of him,” she said tonelessly. “He is, I’m told, a <em>dreamboat</em>.”</p><p>“You disagree,” said Ms. Thompson, whose eyes had never left Cyd.</p><p>Cyd’s face gave nothing away. “I’ve never met him,” she said.</p><p>“I don’t like him already,” Miss Kloss volunteered, and Miss Swift smiled warmly at her. “Indeed. Anyone who could make Jessie so upset is no one I’d like to meet. We’ll find the reason he’s behaving this way, no matter. In the meanwhile, let’s not let this one stubborn mystery distract us from the <em>excellent</em> work that Cyd has done. Round of applause for Cyd!” A loud eruption of cheers followed, and Cyd nodded slightly, looking very unused to the attention.</p><p>“Now,” said Miss Swift, “To forge ahead will take a great deal of organization and help from all of you. Cyd, we must speak to all your coworkers as soon as possible to try to create a physical record of calls placed. Unfortunately, everything they’ve overheard on those calls would likely be inadmissible as hearsay, so we need a log of each connection they’ve made for our cheating husbands, as far back as they can remember and as far forward as we can go until these cases go to some form of hearing.”</p><p>“I can draw up a lunch schedule,” said Cyd. “They’ll enjoy the opportunity to gossip with someone new.”</p><p>“Karlie darling, can you accompany Cyd and help her get down everything they say? We will need a written record, and your shorthand is so good.”</p><p>“Of course,” said Miss Kloss. “Though, it might go a long way towards greasin’ the gears if Swift Investigations was to pay for the girls’ lunches. Wouldn’t it?” This last was addressed to Cyd, who nodded.</p><p>“Yes, I believe it might. They’re giving up a cigarette break, after all.”</p><p>Miss Swift, fingers tented before her lips, nodded very gravely. “Good thought, both of you. We’ll use the sundries account. Take them somewhere nice, but not so formal that they feel like they can’t be comfortable. Somewhere they can get a nice piece of pie.”</p><p>“Very good,” said Ms. Thompson. “Now, what will you have myself and Mister Hiddleston doing? Surely not knitting sweaters by the fire.”</p><p>“I wouldn’t dream of it,” said Miss Swift warmly. “I had rather thought that perhaps you could use your admirable investigative skills to follow up, not on our cheating husbands’ personal activities, but on their business doings. I’m not even sure what we might be looking for, other than some sign that they might stand to gain a profit from their wives’ commitments. Are they benefited by an insurance policy of some sort? Could they use the property that came with her to the marriage?” She began ticking off the questions on her fingers, but looked delighted when Thomas chimed in: “Have they a problem at the horse races?”</p><p>“Was she from a wealthier family than they were?” piped up Ms. Thompson, already looking eager.</p><p>“Precisely,” said Miss Swift. “See, you already know exactly what to look for. I knew I had surrounded myself with wise companions.”</p><p>“Hear, hear,” said Miss Kloss.</p><p>“That leaves only your father unoccupied,” Miss Swift told her friend. “I rather thought we would call on his legal expertise to build our cases against the husbands. We shall rely on all our other friends to bring him the evidence of wrongdoing, and thus keep the coals rather hot under the feet of our bad husbands, rather than allowing focus to drift to Doctor Gottwald, and the assertions he’s made about the wives’ mental hygiene.”</p><p>Vanessa’s soft voice, tentative as it was, nonetheless captured the attention of the group.  “What’s he saying about me?”</p><p>Cyd paused. “I believe that the diagnosis that Doctor Gottwald and your husband agreed upon was ‘nervous hysteria’.”</p><p>Vanessa’s knuckles tightened around the fabric of her skirt. “And what is the treatment for nervous hysteria?”</p><p><em>“Nothing you will ever be concerned with,”</em> said Ms. Thompson in a tone of ringing finality. “Because you are not going to that place. We will not allow it. I want you to put it out of your head entirely, is that quite plain?” Miss Swift noticed that the pen in Ms. Thompson’s hand was trembling; perceiving her glance, Ms. Thompson drew a deep breath, visibly calming herself. “Now. You will need something to occupy your time, as sitting around here fretting will do you no good. Have you any skills?”</p><p>Vanessa looked doubtful. “I can cook. My mother taught me.”</p><p>“Wonderful,” said Miss Swift. “That makes exactly one person in this household who can.” At Miss Kloss’s offended face, she added, “Karlie darling, your aperitifs are beyond compare, but they <em>are</em> rather a liquid lunch.”</p><p>“See if I ever bring you vermouth in the tub again,” rejoined Miss Kloss gaily, and Miss Swift blew her a kiss before turning back to Vanessa.</p><p>“Vanessa, an army marches on its stomach, and this one has been marching on toast points for far too long. If we put the remainder of our sundries account towards regularly supplying you with some good groceries, do you think you could manage to eke out some hot meals? It’s safe to assume we’ll all be here quite a lot over the next few days and weeks, and it would be a marvelous comfort.”</p><p>“I’d be happy to,” said Vanessa. “I hope you don’t mind French. John always said my cooking was too self-conscious to be truly great.”</p><p>“Well, I haven’t the faintest idea what that means, but I do love French cooking,” said Miss Swift. “Feel free to experiment wildly in the kitchen, it couldn’t possibly be worse than the time we tried to make hollandaise and didn’t notice the egg had turned until after we’d cracked it.”</p><p>“Or the time Miss Swift salted both our coffees on accident,” added Miss Kloss.</p><p>“Or the time Karlie accidentally petrified a ham.”</p><p>“Don’t forget the time you tried to ripen bananas in the oven.”</p><p>“Kippers in a jar in the glove box!”</p><p>“Aspic stew!”</p><p><br/>
“Yes, I think our understanding of the current culinary regime is quite nuanced,” cut in Ms. Thompson. Turning to Vanessa, she added, “Rest assured, your cooking will be much appreciated. I shall meet you at the foot of the stairs on Friday morning, it will be lovely to have someone to accompany me on the bus to Market Drayton. Now that that’s settled, who is willing to be the unfortunate soul to update the Misses Sally, Selena and Gracie on their husbands’ infidelities?” </p><p>“I will,” said Miss Swift quickly. “It should come from me.”</p><p>“But it shouldn’t come without help,” said Thomas quickly. “Please. Allow one of us to accompany you, a trusted advisor. Preferably someone with a calming gravity and a respectable air, such as Ms. Thompson or Mr. Kloss.”</p><p>Miss Swift calculated quickly and nodded. “That is a capital idea. It could go a long way towards calming a young woman’s fears to have someone trustworthy and local. Ms. Thompson, won’t you consider coming with me on one or two of these unfortunate visits?”</p><p>“I will,” Ms. Thompson told her. Then, turning to Thomas, she added, “Though don’t think I didn’t catch you casting me in the role of grey eminence, you little sod. I’m only fifty-three,” she said rather severely, over the stifled giggles of all the girls.</p><p>Thomas bowed in Ms. Thompson’s direction. “My deepest apologies, madam. Allow me to purchase your next… two? Pints at the Swan.”</p><p>“Make it three and you’re forgiven,” said Ms. Thompson.</p><p>“As long as we’re buying people drinks,” suggested Miss Swift, “I move we all adjourn to the Swan right away, so that we can toast our excellent progress. Cyd, your first is on me.”</p><p>Cyd looked surprised to be so befriended, but nodded, albeit a bit stiffly. “That would be very nice, I think.”</p><p>The group rose to go, except for Vanessa, who sat, looking a bit bereft, until Miss Kloss turned on her heel and went back to haul her off the couch, saying: “Oh no you don’t. When Miss Swift says <em>all of us</em>, she means <em>all of us</em>.”</p><p>And, giving in to inevitable gravity, Miss Vanessa was pulled along into the heart of the group.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The next day, Thomas was awakened by the sound of a foghorn, going off six inches from his ear. As he surfaced from sleep, the sound resolved itself into that of a six-bells fire; then an automobile horn; and finally, as he opened one eye, his own phone ringing with a viciousness that seemed unwarranted. He dislodged the receiver with some difficulty.</p><p>“Hello?”</p><p>“Your interference isn’t wanted.”</p><p>Thomas felt the slow cold chill of a threat coming through the line. “I’m sorry?” he said, and instantly cursed himself for the awful British instinct to apologize, always.</p><p>“Your interference isn’t wanted,” the male voice repeated. “You would be better off leaving others’ business alone.”</p><p>And before Thomas could say, “Who is this?” the line was disengaged. He stared, blearily, at the phone in his hand for several moments, replaying the unpleasant message in his head, trying to place the voice. Mr. Mayer seemed like the strongest possibility, being as Thomas had punched him in the nose; however, there were four other husbands currently under investigation, any one of whom could have taken umbrage to the doings of Swift Investigations. There was only one thing for it—Thomas sat up, a heroic effort with his pounding head, and dialed for the switchboard operator.</p><p>“Yes, could you tell me what number was just connected to this one?” he asked. “01203-2329? Yes, thank you. Wait, sorry, to what telephonist am I speaking? Cynthia Stagg? Thank you, Miss Stagg. You are performing admirably.” He hung up on the bemused Miss Stagg and focused blearily on the note paper where he had written down the phone number. 01203. Coventry.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“I can’t stand it. I must know. I <strong>must</strong>!” announced Miss Swift. “How on earth do people wait for information like this?”</p><p><em>“They sit on their bloody hands,”</em> Miss Kloss informed her, “before their friends burn their ears clean off wi’ a hot curling iron, do you not see this thing I’m holding?”</p><p>“Yes sorry Karlie,” said Miss Swift contritely, and remained comically stiff for about thirty seconds before wriggling with excitement again. “But it’s just so <em>exciting</em>, knowing they’re out on their date! And it’s your father!!! The most dashing and romantic man we know, apart from Mr. Hiddleston of course. And a lonely widower, for oh how many years? Are you quite sad about it? Are you hopeful? Are you a perfect storm of emotions?”</p><p>Total silence greeted her barrage of questions. “Karlie?”</p><p>Miss Kloss stepped from behind Miss Swift, and wordlessly held up a small hank of burnt-off hair. Just then, Miss Swift noted the terrible smell of singe all around them.</p><p>“This is what happens when you get a curler stuck in your friend’s hair because she won’t stop squirming,” Miss Kloss said ominously.</p><p>Miss Swift winced. “Do you think we can cover it with a hat?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Hello there,” said Cyd, who looked very put together indeed in a grey wool box jacket with white lining and gloves. One would never have guessed that she’d spent the prior evening in a pub; or that, four pints in, she had challenged Thomas to a game of darts—and won. “I like your side hat.”</p><p>“Oh, it’s not meant to be one,” said Miss Swift gaily. “But I made Karlie burn my hair off this morning, so we’re making do.”</p><p>Cyd blinked. “Is this a tradition in American friendships?”</p><p>Miss Swift linked her arm through Miss Kloss’s and beamed at her. “Now it is.”</p><p>“You are incorrigible and strange,” Miss Kloss informed her fondly.</p><p>“And you are the oddest friend I have,” returned Miss Swift, equally warmly. Then, turning to Cyd, she opened her purse. “Miss Cyd, take my pocketbook. There should be more than enough to buy yourselves and your coworkers some lunches. Who are we treating today?”</p><p>“Bertha Rumble and Cynthia Stagg,” said Cyd. “They will have only half an hour, so I told them we’d order for them ahead of time at the Holly Bush so they could enjoy their lunch.”</p><p>“Cyd, you have a first-rate mind for this sort of thing,” said Miss Swift. “Between you and Karlie, our unfortunate wives are certain to have an airtight case. Please, make sure to treat yourselves and the girls to a good dessert.” She gave them each air kisses on the cheek and disappeared around the corner, her giggle hanging in the air after her like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. Karlie turned to Cyd. “God help me, I’d let her burn some of <em>my</em> hair off if she asked. Shall we?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Oh, we <em>shall</em>,” said Miss Swift, her eyes as big as saucers. Accepting Thomas’s 20p, the pie vendor dipped his tongs into his cart’s smoking-hot innards and fished out two perfect sausage rolls, which he dabbed with coarse mustard before nestling them in wax paper packets and handing them over to Miss Swift and Thomas. Transaction completed, he continued down Lichfield Road, the bell at the front of his handcart sounding merrily. Thomas and Miss Swift walked the other way, albeit slowly, as they ate.</p><p>“This is the perfect food,” Miss Swift enthused. “The perfect food and the perfect day to eat it on.”</p><p>Thomas looked up at the wool-grey sky, cold and damp as only an English summer day can be. “You are ready to greet the world entire,” he remarked. “I was sick in a hatbox this morning.”</p><p>“Oh, I was awfully sick too! Karlie and I were in bits this morning, it was really quite scandalous. I think what brought me round was the knowledge that even now, as we’re both feeling so wretched, love is blooming.”</p><p>Thomas paused with a sausage roll halfway into his mouth. Then he caught the meaning. “You’re talking about Ms. Thompson and Mr. Kloss’s date, aren’t you.”</p><p>“Yes, of course! How could anyone be thinking of anything else! It’s so perfectly romantic, that these two should find each other at the twilight of their years.”</p><p>“She’s only fifty-three,” said Thomas loyally.</p><p>“Yes, as you discovered at your cost,” said Miss Swift rather smugly. “How many beers did she make you buy again, last night?”</p><p>“It was five pints in total,” said Thomas, “But only three of them were for the age thing. The others were settling a bet.”</p><p>“What was the bet?”</p><p>“That Cousin Cyd couldn’t beat me at darts.”</p><p>Miss Swift made a sympathetic face, then tactfully changed the subject. “So where are we going today?”</p><p>“I rather thought we could attend to a much-neglected mystery,” said Thomas, pulling out a folded paper from his breast pocket. Miss Swift smiled as she saw her crest appear. “I rather thought we could go poking about the antique shops, see if any of the owners recognized the emblem.”  </p><p>“I think that’s a wonderful idea,” said Miss Swift, going up on tiptoes to kiss him lightly. As the kiss ended, she stayed close, her gaze falling to his mouth as she very deliberately pursed her mouth, tasting one, then the other, plump lip.</p><p>“Alternatively,” said Thomas, his voice breaking a bit, “We could retire to my apartment.”</p><p>“Now that,” said Miss Swift, “is the best idea I’ve heard all day.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>It was several hours, and one very deep nap, before Thomas remembered what he’d meant to tell Miss Swift. “I received a very odd phone call this morning,” he told her.</p><p>“Oh?”</p><p>“Yes. It was rather threatening, actually.”</p><p>Behind him, Miss Swift rose up in the bedcovers, placing one slim hand at his waist and hooking her chin over his shoulder. “How was it threatening?”<br/>
“Well, he didn’t give his name. And all he said was, your interference isn’t wanted.”</p><p>“That’s it?”</p><p>“And that I would be ‘better off leaving others’ business alone’.”</p><p>“That’s an awfully vague message for a private detective,” said Miss Swift, sounding amused. She began to rub his shoulders. “How are you supposed to know what business he means? That could apply to any case I have.”</p><p>“Not to mine,” said Thomas. “Genealogy and titling rarely involve angry, anonymous phone calls.”</p><p>“Are you concerned?” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“I wasn’t until the telephonist told me that the call had been connected from Coventry,” said Thomas, and Miss Swift’s hands slowed.</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>Her hands resumed. “Do you think you will tell Ms. Thompson?”</p><p>“I hadn’t decided yet,” said Thomas. “On the one hand, I can’t prove it was her son. On the other hand, I feel wrong keeping it a secret. We’ve always shared information regarding our cases, for as long as I’ve known her.” He looked over his shoulder at Miss Swift. “What do you think I ought to do?”</p><p>Miss Swift looked thoughtful. “What do you think she would do, if the situation were reversed?”</p><p>Thomas frowned. “I think she would tell me straightaway.”</p><p>“Then I think you have your answer.”</p><p>“But don’t you think it will be a burden on her mind? What if I worry her for nothing?”</p><p>“What if you worry her for something?” Miss Swift rejoined rather reasonably. “Ms. Thompson is a sensible woman. She will take sensible precautions. But she can’t do that if you keep information from her, because you’re afraid of causing her pain. Besides, what new pain could this information bring, that many years of estrangement hasn’t already caused?” </p><p>Thomas shrugged and looked down at his hands. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “And I suppose you’re right. I just wish I could understand why he seems so hellbent on hurting his mother.”</p><p>Miss Swift sighed, and wrapped her arms a bit tighter around his shoulders. “In my experience,” she said, “There are simply some people who delight in cruelty. Their families will spend their whole lives trying to understand what they’ve done wrong, but there’s never any answer, because there was never any wrong done. They were just born mean.”</p><p>“I suppose I simply have trouble understanding how someone like that could have been raised by Emma Thompson,” said Thomas. “I mean, you’ve met her. I assure you, the woman is a saint.”</p><p>Miss Swift made a considering noise into his shoulder. “Do you think it came from his father?”</p><p>Thomas sighed. “Perhaps. From what I know of Nicholas Skinner, Emma was better shut of him, and Tristan, too. The divorce was… rancorous. To this day, there are people in this town who won’t speak to Emma civilly.”</p><p>“And he kept Tristan?”</p><p>“Oh no. He remarried and began another family about two years after the divorce was finalized. Lives on the other side of town. The only times he ever came into contact with them was when some sort of business had to be conducted, and I believe on holidays and birthdays for Tristan. Other than that, Emma raised him alone from the age of thirteen onwards.”</p><p>“And she never thought of remarrying?”</p><p>Thomas smiled. “I think that to Emma, her freedom was too hard-won to give it up again. She once told me men were more difficult to eradicate than smallpox.”</p><p>Miss Swift smiled. “A woman after my own heart. So, how do you think Mr. Kloss will win her over?”</p><p>“I haven’t the faintest,” said Thomas, “But if he’s taken her to Warwickshire, he’s well on his way. They have the most fascinating collection of death masks there, and if you’re very nice they’ll let you touch one.”</p><p>“And to think, you only offered me coffee on our first date. I could have touched a death mask. I want a do-over.”</p><p>Thomas turned over in her arms, caught her in a kiss. “I’ll give you a do-over.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“You’re quiet today,” said Ms. Thompson, turning another page in a minor history of Empingham.</p><p>Thomas smiled, but did not take his eyes off the Kendrew Barracks newspaper index. “I’m using quiet tactically. Hoping you’ll feel honor-bound to fill my silence with the thrilling details of your date.”</p><p>“Pshaw,” Ms. Thompson scoffed, but Thomas could see she was pleased. The comfortable silence extended; finally, Ms. Thompson said, “He has an interesting history, for a lawyer.”</p><p>“Mmm? How so?” said Thomas, feigning absorption in a column marked ‘winter vegetables; preservation of’.</p><p>“He spent the Great War as a member of the Merchant Navy,” said Ms. Thompson. “He said most of his time was spent trying not to peel potatoes too loudly, lest the U-boat crews hear.”</p><p>“God, what a thing,” said Thomas, who had been kept stateside in the Non-Combatant Corps due to asthma. “How old was he?”</p><p>“Oh, barely eighteen. I was only a girl of seventeen when it started,” said Ms. Thompson. “I had just started my first job as a shelver at the Wrexham library, under Miss Turner. A formidable woman.”</p><p>Thomas closed his book now, smiling. The spell was cast. Ms. Thompson was on to libraries.</p><p>“She used to make us hoist barbells in the courtyard every morning to condition our muscles for book-lifting, and touch our toes eight times before we climbed any ladder. It sounds awful, but oh, we loved her so. I remember every time we came in on Wednesdays. Wednesdays were terrible because the library was closed on Tuesdays, and so there would be a heaping great pile of books, two days’ worth, that people had returned through the slot. Oh, it made you want to cry, looking at that enormous bin, you thought you’d never be done. But she would steel us all. ‘Courage, girls!’ I remember clear as day. ‘Once more into the breach!’ My God, she was old even then. She’s been gone forty years, and I still hear her voice like it was yesterday.” Ms. Thompson blinked back tears, and Thomas hastened to intercept them, handing her his handkerchief. She took it gratefully and dabbed at her eyes. “I suppose I should blame Mr. Kloss for all this,” she said, sniffing a bit.</p><p>“Oh? How so?” asked Thomas.</p><p>“Well, one can hardly go on a date at the ripe old age of fifty-three without contemplating, on some level, one’s mortality,” said Ms. Thompson. “It’s a funny old world, isn’t it? I never thought I’d be doing something like this at my age. Going out on a first date like some kind of ingénue.”</p><p>“I don’t know,” said Thomas. “It sounds like rather a delightful way to be fifty-three.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson smiled. “Do you know, it really was.”</p><p>“Do you think you’ll see him again?” asked Thomas, remembering the painful death that had been promised if he failed to gather this information for Miss Swift.</p><p>Ms. Thompson cleared her throat and made a show of adjusting her reading material. Peering through her spectacles at a page Thomas knew to be the title leaf, she said, “Another trip to the Warwickshire rolls has already been arranged, yes.”’</p><p>“Oh has it,” Thomas teased. “And what materials have so captured your attention in Warwickshire?”</p><p>“If you must know, I’m still looking for traces of our vanishing eighth Earl of Rutland. Mr. Kloss had some very good suggestions for usage of the old tax records that merit exploration.”</p><p>“Indeed?” said Thomas. “Do tell.”</p><p>“It has to do with his brothers. We know they only split the inheritance three ways, but what about the annual allowance? Men of their station had to maintain themselves, and that income was taxable. Mr. Kloss theorizes that if we could find any evidence of increase in their annual taxes at close to a single time, and that single time was not simply the date of Martin’s death, we could find when Martin was cut off and everyone else’s allowances got larger. This of course presupposes two things: that Martin was indeed cut off, allowance and all, and not simply left out of the inheritance, and that the brothers benefited from his allowance. It’s very possible they didn’t—maybe the family decided to build a stables, or sponsor an artist, or spend it all on hats. But if we are very lucky, we might be able to pinpoint the year the rift happened. And if we know the year the rift happened, we might be able to figure out what caused it.”</p><p>Thomas blinked. “That’s genius.”</p><p>“It is rather clever,” said Ms. Thompson. “However, it presupposes quite a chain of events, and I don’t need to tell you how dangerous it is to go out on a limb of presupposition where genealogy is concerned. Remember the Fisher family?”</p><p>“How could I forget?” said Thomas. “God, what a morass that was.”</p><p>They both contemplated, in a moment of silent horror, the Fisher family.</p><p>Thomas was the first to break the silence. “Speaking of messy entanglements, I have a bit of information which Miss Swift convinced me it was wrong to withhold from you. I warn you, it is unpleasant.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson closed her book. “Go ahead.”</p><p>“I received a threatening phone call yesterday morning, telling me to cease interference with others’ business. He declined to say any more, nor to identify himself, but I phoned the telephone operator, who disclosed that the connection was from Coventry.”</p><p>“Is that all?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Well, that is interesting,” said Ms. Thompson. “Unpleasant, as you said, but I think the unpleasantry is meant to distract us.”</p><p>Thomas blinked. “You’re taking this rather well.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson waved it off. “If I genuinely thought it were my son, I imagine I would be much more upset. As it stands, however, I don’t believe it is. Do <strong>you</strong> think it sounded like Tristan?”</p><p>“I really couldn’t say. I’ve only encountered him the handful of times, I wouldn’t claim to know his voice well, especially not over the telephone.”</p><p>“Fair enough,” said Ms. Thompson. “Well, I do know my son, and this is not the type of thing Tristan would do. It’s far too aggressive, far too direct. He wouldn’t want to soil his hands—and with a phone call? No no no, that’s so very worldly. Tristan operates on a higher plane, you see.”</p><p>“Ahh,” said Thomas, although he did not see.</p><p>“I have no doubt that Tristan prays very hard for me, and wishes very fervently that God will show me the error of my ways. If he becomes very exercised over it all, he might stretch so far as to consult with a bishop over what’s to be done with me. But to pick up a phone, make a threat? No. He’d see that as stooping to my level.”</p><p>“Stooping to your—” Thomas stopped himself, running a hand down his face in exasperation. It was taking a great deal out of him at the moment, not to call Ms. Thompson’s son a prat.</p><p>Ms. Thompson patted his hand. “Believe me, dear, your sympathy is appreciated, but it’s not necessary. I’ve grown used to this.”</p><p>“You shouldn’t have to,” said Thomas with some heat.</p><p>“That’s as it may be,” said Ms. Thompson. “But nonetheless, here we are. Investigating a matter so sordid my son wants nothing to do with it.” She maintained a straight face for just a moment, then broke into a wide grin. “Isn’t it marvelous?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Karlie, this is absolutely marvelous,” pronounced Miss Swift. They were in the war cabinet over the florist’s. It was Saturday night, and the papers spread across the table included the testimony of nearly every telephone operator in Stafford. “Don’t you think it’s marvelous?” This last question was addressed to Mr. Kloss, who, along with Cyd and Vanessa, had been reviewing and piecing together the testimony for the last two hours.</p><p>Mr. Kloss took his spectacles off and polished them on his shirttail. “As loathe as I am to feed my daughter’s tendency to preen,” he said, “I must admit when I am defeated. This is as fine a bit of evidence gathering as I have ever seen.”</p><p>Miss Kloss gave a wide, cheery grin, and threw her arms around her father, who sat next to her on the couch. “Thank you, Daddy.” Her kiss left a mauve print on his cheek, which he scrubbed off good-naturedly.</p><p>“Yes, yes, credit where it’s due. Do you ladies know, you have outdone many barristers I’ve worked with? This bit here, where you’ve consistently labeled every bit of testimony with the name and address of the witness, as well as the date taken and the names of all the interviewers? That is better than many exhibits I’ve seen introduced into evidence.”</p><p>“Oh, but that weren’t my doing,” said Miss Kloss. “That were Vanessa.”</p><p>“Really, Miss Vanessa?” said Mr. Kloss. “This is excellent! Where did you learn to create such a uniform system?”</p><p>“I was a secretary and a typist, before I met John,” volunteered Vanessa shyly.</p><p>“Well, clearly, you have quite a knack for it,” said Mr. Kloss. “This bit where you’ve cross-referenced other operators who’ve connected calls by each husband? I am duly impressed by your thought process; you have a top-rate legal mind.”</p><p>Vanessa, flattered to muteness, blushed. Miss Swift, for her part, looked fit to burst with pleasure. “I am so proud of each and every one of you,” she said. “Cyd, without your fine mind for incisive questions, we would never have gotten such good testimony from the telephonists. Without Karlie’s lightening shorthand, everything they told us would have been lost, and without Vanessa’s impeccable organizational skills, we’d be lost when it comes to building a court case. Mr. Kloss, in your opinion, do we have enough material to prevent the wives from being committed or harmed?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss tapped the pile of papers into a neat grouping before fastening them with a paper clip. “A good barrister never promises a legal outcome,” he said. “But you four have presented me with the foundations of a very strong case. We will begin rehearsal of your testimony tomorrow.”</p><p>Vanessa looked worried. “I’ll have to testify?”</p><p>“Yes, which is precisely why we’re beginning practice before we even file the injunction,” said Mr. Kloss. “By the time you are called upon, giving your testimony will feel as familiar and natural as putting on your hat and gloves. And twice as safe.”</p><p>“Will John be there in the courtroom?”</p><p>“Most likely, he will be,” replied Mr. Kloss. “But remember that we are simply seeking an injunction to prevent involuntary commitment. This is not a criminal proceeding, and so many of the courtroom theatrics you may be picturing will not apply. Likely, we’ll be sitting in the judge’s chambers, which are like a comfortable salon, being interviewed with a court typist present. You won’t be in a witness box, and there will be no jury of strangers. There will be you, me, the judge, the typist, Mr. Mayer and his attorney. And I will not allow you to be badgered or bullied by anyone in that room.” His words had a comforting air of finality, and Taylor thought for a moment how nice it would have been to have a father like that, reassuring and steadfast. Her visions of fireside talks and pipe smoke were disrupted, though, by the clattering arrival of Ms. Thompson and Thomas, bearing supper for the group. “Hot meat pies for everyone—hello,” Ms. Thompson said, going a bit pink as Mr. Kloss met her at the door, relieving her of one of her heavy bags, then her overcoat.</p><p>“Hello,” he murmured back, and, noticing five youthful gazes turned directly upon them, added <em>sotto voce</em> out of the corner of his mouth, “You look very lovely this evening.”</p><p>“Thank you,” Ms. Thompson returned just as quietly, and Miss Swift shot Thomas a meaningful little smirk before elbowing him gently in the ribs. “Come help me find some plates for everyone.” Tea saucers and cereal bowls were pressed into service from the sparse shared kitchen of the Misses Kloss and Swift, and the entire group settled on cushions and chairs around the low tea table that held all the documents. As the night grew darker around the little yellow attic room, the merry chatter filled the night like lamplight; like pipesmoke; like family.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“You look pensive,” observed Thomas as he navigated a tricky roundabout through Atherstone.</p><p>Miss Swift, cheek resting on folded arms on the rolled-down window of Ms. Thompson’s borrowed Austin Seven Ruby, didn’t shift from her dreamy position, even though the brisk breeze fluttered her eyelashes. “I’m thinking about Christine Carpenter. I’m wondering what I’ll feel, seeing where she was enclosed.”</p><p>“Ah,” said Thomas.</p><p>“Do you think she truly wanted to be shut up in there, or do you think it was simply the least horrid of many horrid options?”</p><p>“Well, the fourteenth century was hardly a bed of roses for anyone,” said Thomas. “She was likely barely past infancy when the famine of 1315 happened, but even a very young child can know she’s suffering, and that went on for two years. People ate one another, crime exploded, parents abandoned their children. And then another one happened in 1321, eight years before she was walled up. If you had survived two famines by the time you were our age, and seen the society around you turn to murderous cannibalism, perhaps being shut up in a nice peaceful church, safe and protected with a steady source of food, would begin to look very inviting.”</p><p>“You don’t sound like you think faith had much to do with it,” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“I suppose I don’t,” said Thomas. “Though, what strikes us as a rather shocking act of religiosity today might not have been quite so strange then. Obviously not everyone was going around having themselves plastered into closets, but the church was considered a perfectly acceptable profession to go into, perhaps even a very good one. It wasn’t the slightly queer choice it is today.”</p><p>“Do you ever wish you could go back, see what life was like back then? In the times you investigate for your clients?”</p><p>Thomas pulled a considering face. “Sometimes, yes,” he said after some deliberation. “To witness something as significant as the Battle of Agincourt or the burning of the Spanish Armada. The signing of the Magna Carta, something like that. But then I consider that if I were actually anywhere near the Battle of Agincourt, I’d probably end up with an arrow fletching sticking out of my neck, and not a lick of ether in sight for hundreds of years to dull my pain.”</p><p>“You know where I’d like to visit,” said Miss Swift, turning in her seat and tucking her feet underneath her, her hands flying up to animate her thoughts. “I’d like to visit a great castle, but I wouldn’t go where everyone else would go, to the throne room and the terrible dungeon where people were kept in chains and the place over the drawbridge where they boiled the oil and all that. I’d much rather visit the places where the food was cooked, and where the laundry was washed, and the places where the babies were nursed. I think there would be so much more to learn from the ladies who washed Henry the eighth’s sheets than there would be sitting in the great hall, where everyone was minding their Ps and Qs lest they get their heads chopped off.”</p><p>Thomas couldn’t help the smile spreading across his face. “You are… extraordinary,” he finally came out with. “The way your mind works, you are a wonder. You’re a born detective!”</p><p>“You’re making fun of me.”</p><p>“I am most certainly not. Given the power to travel back in time, you have completely skipped over pageantry and cache and gone straight to the place where you are guaranteed to get the most solid information, unimpeded by politics or manners. I am in awe of your investigative mind.”</p><p>Miss Swift frowned in concentration as she scanned his words for any trace of sarcasm. Finding none, she bit her lip. “Do you really think so?”</p><p>“I really think so.”</p><p>Miss Swift looked pleased. So pleased, in fact, that she hid her pinkening face by looking out of the window as the countryside rolled by. “Good.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The rest of the morning ran by smoothly; the soft burbling of the Austin Seven’s engine combined most delightfully with the summer thunderstorm which enveloped them starting in Wigston Parva. The dense curtain of rain drowned out all sound in a comfortable blanket, and Thomas was surprised to find that he felt no need to fill the hush with conversation. Miss Swift seemed to feel the same way; after some time, she moved to the edge of her own seat, and, with some adjustments for the gear shifter, arranged her body so it draped elegantly over the open space between the seats, resting her sleek blond head on Thomas’s shoulder and nodding off almost instantaneously. The scent of rain rose up through the little car, mingling comfortingly with the dusty, boot-cupboard scent of the Austin’s engine and the oil-rich tang of the new tarmac recently laid through Silverstone. Thomas enjoyed the slip and slick of Miss Swift’s hair against his cheek; carefully, between gear shifts, he brought his fingers up to smooth one of the ringlets, releasing the scent of shampoo and, oddly, a touch of singe. He wondered if she had been trying to cook again. Spotting a likely-looking pub attached to a petrol station, he gently coaxed the Austin into the station, being careful not to jar Miss Swift’s head as he put the car into park and signaled to the attendant. Turning, he pressed his lips to her forehead: “Darling, are you hungry yet?” he murmured against her skin, marveling at the ferocity of instinct that washed over him—to feed and water and nourish her, to form a haven in which she would never know a single want. Miss Swift stirred; yawned; stretched and looked around at a world made fresh by rain.</p><p>
  <em>“Famished.” </em>
</p><p> </p><p>They lunched on trout and cellar pickles, washed down with a nutty brown ale that smacked, pleasantly, of peat. The soft rain outside turned to a light spatter, then disappeared completely as the sun came out, drenching everything in dazzle. Thomas squinted against the brilliance as they emerged from the pub. “We can’t be more than a couple of hours from Shere.” He extracted some small bills from where they had wadded in his wallet and paid the petrol attendant.</p><p>“Perfect,” said Miss Swift. “It will be exactly enough time for us to form a preconception that shall turn out to be completely wrong.”</p><p>“I like the way your mind works,” said Thomas, opening the door of the Seven for her. “I shall endeavor to form a complete picture, right down to the paint on the walls, so that the reality can surprise me all the better.”</p><p>“Did you have a complete picture of me before you met me?” Miss Swift asked.</p><p>“If I did, it wasn’t in my head for long enough to remember,” said Thomas. “I learned about your existence about twenty minutes before I met you for the first time.”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“Yes. Ms. Thompson told me you’d hung out your sign, and I decided to pop over and meet you right away. She made me put on a tie first,” Thomas remembered, grinning ruefully.</p><p>“Did she,” said Miss Swift, smiling. “I don’t remember your tie, but I do remember thinking, <em>he’s so tall.</em>”</p><p>“No,” said Thomas.</p><p>“Yes. And handsome as hell.”</p><p>“You flatter me,” he said, putting the Seven in gear and pulling back onto the road.</p><p>“Hardly,” said Miss Swift. “My second thought was that your looks were going to be a terrible inconvenience.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Of course. You were my competitor.” She shot him a sly look out of the corner of her eye. “I didn’t know yet how good a team we made.”</p><p>“We do, don’t we,” said Thomas, holding the wheel with one hand as he unbuttoned his sleeve against the growing warmth of the sun. As if to illustrate the point, Miss Swift noticed and reached over to help, her tongue poking out in concentration as she rolled up the sleeve.</p><p>“Thank you,” he said, readjusting his grip on the wheel and squinting at a confusing, multi-spoked road sign. “I wonder, do you think we make such a good team because of, or despite, our dissimilarities?”</p><p>“Oh, I should think <em>because of</em>,” said Miss Swift. “Think of the whole swaths we fill in for each other! You with your reams of history and your scads of knowledge about every earl and castle and property line within a hundred miles, and me with my <em>complete</em> disregard for propriety and custom.”</p><p>“I would call that your cunning usage of culturally unexpected tactics,” said Thomas.</p><p>“Oh, I like that, it sounds much nicer. Can we also find a nice way to reference my American rudeness?”</p><p>“A marvelous gift for brevity.”</p><p> “How about my interest in prurient gossip?”</p><p>“A deep appreciation of the human condition.”</p><p>“My ignorance of formal table manners?”</p><p>“Refreshing artlessness!”</p><p>“My savagery before coffee?”</p><p>“Now that is something uniquely your own,” said Thomas, “and is therefore impossible to veil with language, nor would I desire to attempt it. I love your foul temper in the morning.”</p><p>The word hung in the air between them like a sunbeam, catching all the ordinary dust of life and turning it into gold.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>They arrived at Shere at two o’clock, and found the church after some two or three  passes down the river street. It was very narrow, and every tombstone and fir tree in the surrounding cemetery was out of true, so that it was difficult to tell if it was the chapel, or everything else, which was leaning. Inside the church, the smell of whitewash was fresh and the tiny blue chips of stained glass in the traceried windows glowed like sapphires. “Where is the cell?” asked Miss Swift.</p><p>“Well, the nave is here,” said Thomas, standing in it, “so we should be able to see the squint from it. The squint is the tiny window they cut for her, to be able to see the Mass, and partake in the communion.”</p><p>“And it’s called a squint!” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“Just so.”</p><p>“Oh, how delightful. What a cunning bit of language. Could that be it?”</p><p>Thomas followed her finger to a slight depression in the wall about halfway down the church. “Oh, you’ve got sharp eyes. Let’s see.”</p><p>They edged around the pews and squatted down to inspect the spot: it was indeed a little window, cut as neat as could be in the plaster, except that it did not lead to a lonely dark cell, but instead to the bright light of outdoors. “How curious,” said Thomas. “Shall we go around?”</p><p>They stepped through the high weeds surrounding the back of the church, getting somewhat dampened in the process, and arrived at a rocky lee in the wall, where the church jutted outwards and a small corner was protected from the wind. Thomas knelt and found the tiny window again. “I owe you an apology, I fear,” he said. “I’ve driven you all this way to show you a cell, and I think that this may be all that remains of the structure.”</p><p>But Miss Swift was kneeling and running her fingertips over a little brass plaque. “Site of the cell of Christine Carpenter,” she read aloud in a tone of respect. “Anchoress of Shere. 1329.” She turned from where she knelt. “Do you think we could find the borders of her walls?”<br/>
 Thomas looked down and about himself. “We could certainly try.” He stepped back, looking consideringly at the spongy ground for traces of indentation, indicating foundations. “It would only have been a few meters deep. She couldn’t have been very tall, with two periods of starvation in her childhood.” He stretched his arms wide, aligning his fingers with a vertical irregularity in the bricks of the church wall. “If this line marked the side of her cell, how far back would it extend?”</p><p>Miss Swift thought for a second before toeing her heels off. “She would have needed room to sleep.” Lowering herself carefully so the top of her head just brushed the church, she stretched her toes out in the soft, damp grass. Thomas went and stood at her feet, extending his arms in a cross so as to make a wall of himself. Squinting up at him, Miss Swift tilted her head and shielded her eyes against the sun.</p><p>“You’re terribly tall, for an anchorite,” he teased.</p><p>“And you’re terribly handsome, for a wall,” she rejoined, and for a moment they grinned at each other.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Driving back to Stafford, Miss Swift lost herself in dreamy speculation. “Can you imagine how well she must have known every brick, every bit of plaster in the place?” she rhapsodized. “How do you imagine she recorded the time? Do you think she would have made marks?”</p><p>“You mean little hashes, like a man on a desert island?” said Thomas.</p><p>“Yes! Or like some French aristocrat, locked up and waiting for the guillotine.”</p><p>“Well, I don’t think she would have had to,” said Thomas. “There would have been many easier markers available to her. We moderns think that a person is very pious if they go to church once or twice a week, but they had liturgies for every hour of the day, and monks to keep track of it all. And the feast days of the saints!  If you were living very nearly inside a church, you couldn’t escape the constant knowledge of the ebb and flow of time. There would always have been someone chanting in Latin, or decorating the altar with flowers in honor of some particular saint, or lighting a candle to mark the hour.”</p><p>“It actually sounds quite lovely,” said Miss Swift. “And not very lonely at all.”</p><p>“Yes!” said Thomas. “Yes, that’s what I’ve always felt as well. Lots of people think it was very horrible, but she was actually interred in the center of activity, in the very busiest part of her world! There would have hardly been a time, day or night, when she couldn’t peer out of the squint and see people bustling about. It would be like being pent up in the Saturday market at Stoke-on-Trent.”</p><p>“When you think about it that way, it seems a wonder she ever got any sleep at all.”</p><p>“What <strong><em>is</em></strong> a wonder,” said Thomas, sitting forward in the driver’s seat as he remembered a long-buried detail, “is why she left. No one’s ever managed to figure that one out.”</p><p>“She left?”</p><p>“Yes. A few years after she was shut up for the first time, she was discovered to be out of her cell. Whether that means she went missing and had to be searched for, or whether they simply found her wandering outside some morning, is unclear. But she wrote to the pope, expressing penitence and asking to be shut up again, tightly, to avoid temptation.”</p><p>Miss Swift’s eyes were like saucers. “And did they?”</p><p>“They did. But they got rid of the door and replaced it with a little pass, through which they could fit her food and her wastes, but no more. And there she spent the rest of her life.”</p><p>Miss Swift ruminated for some miles. Then: “It must have been a man,” she declared.</p><p>“A man?”</p><p>“Who tempted Christine Carpenter out of her cell. Think of it. A woman wanting for nothing, given all her food and water, with plenty of company passing to and fro in the church, and a nice snug bedroom that she never had to leave? The picture wants for nothing but romance.”</p><p>“Why, Miss Swift,” said Thomas, a note entering the lower register of his voice like the subsonic rumble of a massive jungle cat, “Are you suggesting that the fourteenth century’s holiest woman was in need of a roll in the hay?” Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Miss Swift shifting slightly in her seat; he registered the slight upwards slide of her grey woolen skirt and, tantalizingly, a stark Y of black garter against white thigh. Ahead, Thomas had an uninterrupted gauntlet of county byways; blind roundabouts; sheep.</p><p>“I think we should pull over for a bit,” he announced decisively, and, taking advantage of the first sheltered cove by a hedgerow, they did.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>They arrived back to Stafford quite late; slid the warmly ticking Austin Seven into Ms. Thompson’s darkened shed; walked hand-in-hand back through the quiet Sunday streets to the florist’s; kissed long and leisurely under the wisteria. Climbed the stairs and were greeted by Miss Kloss’s stricken face.</p><p>“It’s Jessie,” she said. “They’ve had her committed.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The way it had happened was this. Early on Sunday morning, when half the village was still asleep and the other half was at the early church service, a lorry containing a few men pulled up outside Jessie’s house. Her husband let them in, and some moments later Bertha Rumble had tried to connect a panicked, abortive attempt at a phone call—Jessie got as far as “Help me” before they had their hands on her, then dropped the receiver. Bertha heard her desperate receding pleas for nearly a minute before they had her down the stairs; the neighbors reported hearing her muffled shrieks all the way to the end of the block. Jessie’s husband stood in the garden watching her go, then collected his paper, waved to the horrified neighbors, and went back indoors with a spring in his step. Bertha Rumble had been sent home from the switchboard in hysterics, Cyd had promptly hung up her headphones and gone to find the other wives, and Miss Kloss had been beside herself ever since. “Wi’out you, the girls don’t know what to do,” she muttered to Miss Swift. “Cyd’s been holding them down, but they’re jumpy as anyfing and each one thinks she’s next. None of us know what to say.”</p><p>“Where are they?” said Thomas.</p><p>“Why, right here of course,” said Ms. Thompson, appearing behind Miss Kloss. “I finally got them all to see sense and take soothers. They’re all finally dropped off, and not a moment too soon. That shortest one was nearly into hysterics for the third time. <em>There</em> you are,” addressed to Miss Swift. “I certainly hope you weren’t hoping to squeeze into your bed tonight. There are two panicked wives sleeping in it, head to toe, and another two in Miss Kloss’s.”</p><p>“Before you even think about it, that sofa is mine,” said Karlie. “I’ve earned it today, all the howling I’ve listened to.”</p><p>“That you have,” Ms. Thompson told her. “You’ve left us quite a mess,” she next informed Thomas, rather severely. “Tomorrow, you will both have to rise early and fix it up. I suggest you take Miss Swift home and make sure she gets a good night’s rest.”</p><p>With that, she took her leave, her haste not entirely obscuring the knowing twinkle with which she took in Miss Swift’s creased skirt and snagged nylons. Miss Kloss, shoulders deep in the liquor cabinet, made a muffled noise of triumph and emerged holding a dusty jar of Luxardo cherries. “Oh, the whiskey sour I’m going to make,” she exclaimed. “I may have to mix it in the bathtub. Shall I pour you some as well?”</p><p>“I think… not,” Thomas said with a sideways glance at Miss Swift, who nodded in subtle confirmation. “I think I shall take Miss Swift home to my… erm, guest bedroom.”</p><p>“More for me,” said Miss Kloss cheerfully, yanking the cork on a bottle of whiskey with her teeth. Miss Swift hesitated at the door. “Karlie, are you quite all right?”</p><p>Miss Kloss waved her off, spilling great gouts of whiskey into a jam jar. “Pah, I will be. You’re back, and that’s the important thing. We’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning?”</p><p>“First thing,” Miss Swift promised her solemnly, and then Thomas had her bundled back into her coat and down the stairs. She was silent during the walk to his apartment; up the stairs; as he took her coat.</p><p>“Would you like a drink?” he asked.</p><p>She shook her head no. “How could we have been so stupid,” she whispered, almost inaudibly. “To think that Jessie was safe in that home. What were we thinking?”</p><p>“Stop that,” Thomas said, crossing the room and wrapping her up tightly in his arms from behind, burying his nose in her hair. To the crown of her head, he said firmly, “We will get her back.”</p><p>“How?” Miss Swift said, and Thomas heard the faint pat of a teardrop splashing on the floor directly beneath her chin. “We don’t even know where they’ve taken her.”</p><p>“We will, though. We will figure it out. I have faith in us. Remember, our inimitable teamwork? Tomorrow will dawn a brighter day, and we will have Mr. Kloss and Ms. Thompson to help us, and <em>we will find her</em>.”</p><p>“What if we don’t,” whispered Miss Swift, and Thomas deduced that this was not a worry she was going to be logicked out of. “Come here,” he said firmly, grasping her by the shoulders and steering her towards the bedroom, where he planted her firmly on the bed and went about undoing her shoes, then the many tiny bobby pins worked into her hair. Once he’d undone all the difficult fiddly bits, he leaned over to extinguish the rose-colored lamp, and, efficiently shucking her of the rest of her clothing, bundled her into a tight coil of quilts, pressing his length and weight against her in the dark. On his forearm, where he’d pillowed her head, he felt a steady progression of tears; he did not mention it, instead focusing on smoothing her soft hair away from her forehead and murmuring soothing noises to her temple. It was a long time until she fell asleep; it was even longer for him.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“I will be brief,” said Mr. Kloss to the increasingly crowded room above the florist’s. “I have failed you. I believed we had more time in which to act, and in that belief I have been proven quite conclusively wrong. You would be right to question me, and my ability to protect you. I have been doing little else. I cannot beg for forgiveness, for I do not deserve it. I am certain that you all have many questions and concerns—before we delve into those, however, I wish to offer you an option.”</p><p>He parceled out four sets of documents to the rumpled-looking wives, many of whom had dark circles under their eyes.</p><p>“These are petitions for civil divorce on the grounds of cruelty, which is a matrimonial offense in the eyes of the law. I cannot advise you on your individual marriages, but I can advise you on the law, and I suggest that if you make the first move, you may catch your husbands wrong-footed enough to avoid engaging in a terrible battle such as we will be obliged to fight on Jessie’s behalf. I had hoped not to ask you to make this decision. I had hoped to contend orders for commitment through the courts, in the customary way, at a civilized pace. We are beyond civilization now, I am afraid. A doctor who will connive to have a young lady taken from her home on the Sabbath day, without recourse to an open court…” Mr. Kloss  trailed off for a moment, and Miss Swift noticed for the first time that he looked nearly as weary and drawn as the wives. “I am aware that a woman who asks for a divorce faces a societal censure far beyond that which a man would. You will encounter coldness from your families, your acquaintances, your churches—” here, Thomas saw Ms. Thompson’s throat clench as she swallowed—“You will face a price I cannot weigh. But I can tell you that without swift action, you are all at risk. You weigh the price of a divorce against your freedom. I will give you all a few hours to dec—”</p><p>He stopped, surprised, as the wives, as one, dived for the papers. For a moment, the air was thick with the sound of scratching fountain pens; then the wives were all looking up at him expectantly.</p><p>“Well then,” said Gracie Gold, whose moppetish face had been streaked with tears since yesterday. “What’s next?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>What was next was a rather clamourous trip to the city courthouse, where Mr. Kloss lead a ragged procession of four determined-looking women clutching papers, plus the Misses Kloss and Swift, Cyd, Ms. Thompson, and Thomas up the stairs and held the door open for them as they entered. The spectacle drew curious stares, but they were as nothing compared to the open goggling of the city clerk as Mr. Kloss approached her desk.</p><p>“Morning, Dottie,” said Mr. Kloss, leaning an elbow on her desk. “I’ve brought you some cases.”</p><p>“Brought me a bloomin’ class action, is what you have,” said the elderly Dottie, who had a pince-nez and wore a violet in her white hair. “I certainly hope you brought me a new inkwell and a cure for arthritis along with it. How much bloody paperwork do you think I can manage in a morning?”</p><p>“Not to worry, Dot,” said Mr. Kloss breezily, “I’ve brought the cavalry. You remember my daughter, Karlie, from Sunday school, and here’s her good friends. All of them have fine handwriting and a good grip on today’s date, so that knocks out half your forms right there. Then there’s Mister Hiddleston, who will be pleased to help you with the stamping and filing, there’s a good chap,” said Mr. Kloss, smoothly pointing Thomas towards the empty seat to the left of Dottie, where the stamp pad lay open and drying. “Finally, allow me to introduce my special friend Ms. Thompson, who will be overseeing all our young friends to make sure they don’t miss a single dotted <em>i </em>or crossed<em> t</em>, I know how particular your judges are. Who’s hearing cases today?”</p><p>“Judge Broadbent,” said Dottie, and the tiny hint of air sucked in by Mister Kloss was noted, and mirrored, by all the wives. Hearing the rustling behind him, Mr. Kloss turned to them. “There, there, ladies. Judge Broadbent is very fair, just a bit brusque.” To Dottie he addressed a question <em>sotto voce</em>: “<strong><em>Is</em></strong> Judge Broadbent feeling brusque today?”</p><p>“Like you wouldn’t credit,” Dottie said. “He’s got piles.”</p><p>“Ah,” said Mr. Kloss. “Ladies? A word.” Corralling the wives to a convenient huddle, he leaned in to confer. “Judge Broadbent is not given to long-winded speeches, nor to any attempts to paper over nasty situations with delicacy. When he is in a bad mood, as I suspect he will be today, the wisest course of action is to answer him directly and in as few words as possible. Do any of you have any questions?”</p><p>Selena looked slightly panicked. “What if he asks me to explain how I met my husband?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss looked puzzled. “Why would that be a probem?”</p><p>“Because we dated on and off for nearly seven years!” whispered Selena, looking a bit hysterical. “It was the talk of the <em>village</em>! He saw other women, then I saw other men, then we saw each other again—oh, it was a <em>mess</em>—and people were talking the whole time. Once, one of my other beaus encountered him in a club and hit him in the face.”</p><p>“I remember that,” said Gracie Gold, then realized, as all the wives stared at her, that she had rather put her foot in it. “Sorry.”</p><p>Mr. Kloss took the interruption as an opportunity to jump in. “Just do the best you can, dear,” he said, patting Selena’s shoulder soothingly. “I am sure he won’t ask you to go into detail.”</p><p>“Oi!” said Miss Kloss from behind the group. “We need signatures over here!”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Judge Broadbent was a harried-looking man with a bird-like set of spectacles and wide grey wings of hair that spread out from just over his ears, though he was quite bald on top. He had already seen three traffic tickets that day and a couple of cases involving the support of unwanted children, so he was perturbed as he took the great sheaf of papers from Dottie and, tapping it heavily on the stack of shifting papers already before him, tried to make sense of it. “Sally Armisen… no wait… Vanessa Mayer… hang it, there are three names here!”</p><p>“Four, m’Lord,” said Mr. Kloss.</p><p>Judge Broadbent looked over his spectacles. “<em>Four</em> separate cases!”</p><p>“Yes, m’Lord.”</p><p>Judge Broadbent began meticulously paging through the filings, setting each into a neat pile before him. “So, Sally Armisen, née Timms, Vanessa Mayer, née Carlton, Selena Bieber, née Gomez, and Grace Kenworthy, née Gold, correct?”</p><p>“That’s correct.”</p><p>“Are you divorcing the whole bloody village?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss allowed himself the faintest trace of a smile. “No sir, just these four.”</p><p>“Good Lord. Very well, let’s hear the first one. Well, who’s it to be? Well, don’t all come up at once,” Judge Broadbent said a bit impatiently, staring over his spectacles at the four women. “You, girl, I suppose you’ll be the first. Come up here and stand before the bench.” Vanessa, who had been clutching Gracie’s hand so tightly her knuckles were white, let go and stepped hesitantly forward.</p><p>“Come now, we haven’t got all day! Mr. Kloss apparently has a small nunnery to start. Harrrum. I see that you are claiming for divorce on the grounds of cruelty. What’s he done?”</p><p>“… done?” Vanessa said very faintly.</p><p>“Yes, girl, what’s he <em>done?</em> Your husband! Beat you, turned you out of doors, threatened you with a weapon? What’s he <strong><em>done</em></strong>?”</p><p>Vanessa stared down at her shoes and bit her lip, seemingly lost for words. Behind her, Gracie Gold leaned over the court railing, whispering a plaintive encouragement.</p><p>“Silence!” said Judge Broadbent to Gracie. “She must do her thinking for herself. And I must say, your client seems at a loss,” he informed Mister Kloss severely. “If she has not got sufficient complaint to avoid wasting the court’s time—”</p><p>“He’sgoingtohavemecommitted,” said Vanessa.</p><p>Judge Broadbent leaned forward, putting a hand to his ear. “Say what?”</p><p>“She said e’s going to have her committed!” said Gracie very stoutly, her eyes flashing fire.</p><p>Judge Broadbent pointed the end of his pen at Gracie. “You. Sit down and don’t speak again until it’s your turn. I shall not warn you again.”</p><p>Looking to Mister Kloss in an agony of muted feeling, Gracie nonetheless did as she was told. Mister Kloss made a pacifying gesture with one hand.</p><p>“Mrs. Mayer,” said Judge Broadbent to Vanessa. “Please repeat yourself plainly.”</p><p>Locating some hidden recess of courage, Vanessa said, her voice wobbly but audible, “He’s trying to have me committed.”</p><p>“He’s trying to have you committed,” repeated Judge Broadbent. “At last, we’re getting somewhere. How do you know this, girl?”</p><p>“He… packed a suitcase for me.”</p><p>“Packed a suitcase?”</p><p>“Yes,” said Vanessa, kneading her lip between her teeth. “And he came up to our room, and he said that he knew how much I had been struggling with my nerves, and that he had arranged for a place for me, and that I should think of it as a lovely vacation.”</p><p>“Hnnnpph,” said Judge Broadbent. “And had you?”</p><p>“Had I what?”</p><p>“Been struggling with your nerves?”</p><p>Vanessa’s eyes were very wide. “I… I don’t know.”</p><p>“Let us try it another way. Had you ever before expressed to your husband that you were suffering from a malady of the nerves, or that your nerves were giving you trouble, things of that nature?”</p><p>Vanessa shook her head. “I don’t… think so?”</p><p>“Very well. What happened next?”<br/>
“I said I didn’t understand, and he said that there was a place that he’d found that specialized in dealing with women like me, women who had <em>trials</em>, and he thought it best for me to go and take a little rest there. And then I got very upset, and I threw the suitcase out of the window into the garden.”</p><p>“Into the garden, eh?” said Judge Broadbent.</p><p>“Yes. It hit a birdbath and exploded.” Behind Vanessa, Miss Kloss stifled a smile.</p><p>“What happened next?”</p><p>“Well, he grabbed me by the arm, and wrenched it, and told me I’d be cleaning it up, and pulled me down the stairs, and then Miss Swift was there.”</p><p>“Miss Swift, who is Miss Swift?”</p><p>“I am, your honor,” said Miss Swift, raising her hand. She had worn white Swiss dotted lace gloves for the day, along with a veiled crown hat, and looked very trim in her best red flannel suit.</p><p>“And you are a friend of Mrs. Mayer’s?”</p><p>“Yes,” said Miss Swift, “a new friend. We met on that day.”</p><p>“A new friend, eh,” said Judge Broadbent. “All right, so you and your husband are having this scene, and you come down the stairs, and there is your new friend Miss Swift, is that it?”</p><p>“And Mister Thomas, and Miss Kloss and her father, Mister Kloss,” said Vanessa.</p><p>“<em>And</em> Mister Thomas, <em>and</em> Miss Kloss, <em>and</em> her father Mr. Kloss,” Judge Broadbent repeated, looking over his spectacles as the relevant three raised their hands. “That is quite a crowd of people coincidentally coming by. Are you referring to this Mr. Kloss, your barrister, right here?”</p><p>“That’s right,” said Vanessa.</p><p>“Now, there’s a stroke of luck,” said Judge Broadbent. “To have your attorney present himself at that moment. You hadn’t called him ahead of time?”</p><p>“I hadn’t engaged him yet,” said Vanessa. “I met him for the first time then, too. I met all of them for the first time.”</p><p>“You met all of them for the first time at that moment, coming down the stairs in the middle of a row with your husband?”</p><p>“Yes,” said Vanessa.</p><p>“Sir,” said Mr. Kloss, “At the risk of interrupting, I think I can offer some explanation.”</p><p>“Yes, please do,” said Judge Broadbent, taking off his spectacles in exasperation.</p><p>“My daughter, Karlie,” said Mr. Kloss, gesturing to his right, “is friends with Miss Swift here, who is a private investigator. Miss Swift was investigating a case which alerted her to the possibility that Mrs. Mayer’s husband might attempt an unjust commitment, and had just received information that morning which implied very strongly that he was about to do so. With that in mind, Miss Swift asked my daughter to accompany her to Mrs. Mayer’s aid, and my daughter, thinking that Mrs. Mayer might be in need of an attorney, rang me.”</p><p>Judge Broadbent waggled the stem of his spectacles generally at Mr. Kloss, Karlie, and Miss Swift. “That explains what the three of you were doing there. What was he doing there?” He pointed at Thomas.</p><p>“Ah yes,’ said Mister Kloss. “Mister Hiddleston is also a private detective, one who was working on the case with Miss Swift.”</p><p>“And this case, give me the broad strokes of it. What lead you to believe that Mrs. Mayer was in immediate danger?” This question was addressed to Thomas, who cleared his throat.</p><p>“I think that, as the primary detective on the matter, Miss Swift is better equipped to respond than I,” he said slowly, looking sideways to Miss Swift for confirmation that he was doing the right thing. She beamed up at him.</p><p>“Well, <strong><em>someone</em></strong> had better respond,” said Judge Broadbent. “Miss Swift, I again ask, what lead you to believe Mrs. Mayer was in immediate danger of being, as Mr. Kloss alleges, unjustly committed?”</p><p>Miss Swift stepped forward. “I have other clients, in fact four other clients besides Mrs. Mayer, whose husbands have been consulting with a local doctor. All five husbands, including Mr. Mayer, have sought the doctor’s advice on how to have their wives committed; we have reason to believe this advice is sought in bad faith because we have also collected evidence suggesting that four of the five husbands are engaged in marital infidelity. Our current theory is that the doctor has gained something of a reputation as a facilitator—”</p><p>“Spare me the theory, please,” said Judge Broadbent. “And give me, in concrete detail, precisely what evidence you have that these consultations between Mr. Mayer and this unnamed doctor took place, and that the contents of the consultations are as you say.”</p><p>“That is where Miss Haim comes in,” said Miss Swift, and the judge sagged a bit. “Miss Haim works at the local telephone switchboard connecting calls. In the course of performing their functions, she and her coworkers have made the connections between the husbands, including Mr. Mayer, and the doctor, which is also how they were privy to the information which alerted us to Vanessa’s—I mean, Mrs. Mayer’s—predicament.”</p><p>Judge Broadbent’s eyebrows nearly climbed off his forehead. “Am I to understand that your case for all these women, the four I see before me and the fifth who is God-knows-where—”</p><p>“She was committed yesterday morning,” said Miss Swift.</p><p>Judge Broadbent barged right through. “Is based on nothing but hearsay and say-so?”</p><p>“If it please you,” Mister Kloss cut in smoothly, “the laws against hearsay do not apply in the case of conspiracy, which is what we collectively allege.”</p><p>“Yes, but you haven’t alleged it here,” pointed out Judge Broadbent. “You’ve alleged cruelty, which is a different matter.”</p><p>“Undoubtedly,” said Mister Kloss. “However, the cruelty arises from the conspiracy, and is the individual grounds upon which each wife is petitioning for divorce.”</p><p>“The type of conspiracy to which the hearsay exemption applies is widely understood to be a matter of either outright criminality or business law, as you well know,” said Judge Broadbent.</p><p>“Widely understood, yes, and yet unwritten. There is no codified exemption for family law,” said Mister Kloss.</p><p>“It is likely there should be,” said Judge Broadbent. “Come now. Surely you can see that setting this precedent would allow every idle housewife in the land to use the courts as a prybar to reveal the inner workings of conversations of prurient interest to her. It’s a busybody’s paradise.”</p><p>“Yes, but that is a theoretical risk,” said Mister Kloss, stepping forward. “It may come to pass, it may not. However, if we fail to act, the outcome is certain. These four women will meet the same fate as my other client. A real danger in the present must outweigh our fears about the theoretical future.”</p><p>Judge Broadbent sat back and sucked at his gums for some time. Then, gesturing faintly to Miss Swift, he said, “Continue.”</p><p>Miss Swift, sensing that she had been afforded a very little leeway, chose her words carefully. “We have collected a record of calls connected between Doctor Gottwald and my clients’ husbands. He has a habit of conferring only with the husbands. To a one, not one of my clients has ever been examined in person by Doctor Gottwald. His relationship to them exists only on paper, each wife submitted as a patient by their husbands.”</p><p>“Did you bring this record with you?” asked Judge Broadbent.</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Permission to approach granted,” said the judge, and took Vanessa’s conscientiously assembled notes, leafing through them as Miss Swift continued.</p><p>“Our records reflect that four out of the five husbands regularly placed calls at small hours of the morning to single women and ladies of note across town, some of whom are employed at the boarding house at Red Lion Street, which we have reason to believe is a—”</p><p>Judge Broadbent cut in smoothly. “Yes, I know, girl. I’ve been a judge in this district for over thirty years.”</p><p>Miss Swift, quite deflated, mouthed the word “cathouse” silently to herself, as she had quite looked forward to saying it in open court. Rallying her thoughts, she continued. “We were alerted to the possibility of Doctor Gottwald’s ill intentions by a young wife, very frightened by one of her husband’s overheard phone conversations. She begged us to intervene and determine his intentions, and in the course of that investigation we discovered the four other wives you see before you.”</p><p>Judge Gottwald waved his pen at the assembled group. “So every one of these women is petitioning for divorce on similar grounds.”</p><p>“That is the size of it, yes,” said Mr. Kloss.</p><p>“Am I given to understand that if I deny divorce for cruelty, I can expect to see re-filings based on infidelity for all four?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss blinked. “I suppose so, yes.” There was a long and dignified pause. “…Do you think that’s likely?”</p><p>Judge Broadbent stared hard over his glasses at the assembled court for quite some time. Then he heaved a mighty sigh. “I suppose we shall spare the forests of Yorkshire and Dottie’s writing hand. Petition for divorce is granted, Missus, or shall I say <em>Ms</em> Mayer. Will you be reverting to your maiden name?”</p><p>Vanessa blinked. “I suppose I hadn’t really thought about it,” she said.</p><p>“Well, once you’ve made up your mind, you can file a form with Dottie. The rest of you lot,” Judge Broadbent said, indicating the other three wives, “Can wait here while I make sure all your papers are in order, or you can wander round the shopping district. It’s not likely to be very lively, watching me read.”</p><p>All three wives looked plaintively at Miss Swift. Reading their expressions correctly, she wrapped an arm around Gracie and sat down on the hard bench. “We’d like to stay right here until it’s done, thanks.”</p><p>“Suit yourself,” said Judge Broadbent. “Dottie! Dottie, bring me my magnifier, please.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>When the newly rechristened Misses Timms, Gomez, Gold and Carlton (for Vanessa had indeed decided to reclaim her maiden name) emerged blinking into the afternoon sunlight, they proved entirely uninterested in deciding matters of employment; housing; finance; future. They all wanted one thing: to find and free Jesse.</p><p>“I know I won’t be able to sleep at night until we get her out,” said Gracie. “How could we? We’re all in the same boat.”</p><p>“It could have happened to any of us,” Sally Timms agreed. “In a way, she freed us—I know I wouldn’t have had the courage to file first if it weren’t for her.”</p><p>“Me neither,” said Vanessa.</p><p> “She would do the same for us,” said Selena.</p><p> </p><p>Which is how they ended up back in the tiny apartment above the florist’s shop,  pouring over the call records of Jessie’s husband James, the demolished remains of a loaf of brown bread crumbing the plate between them. They had been through Jessie’s file three times. There was nothing.</p><p>“Nothing!” spat Miss Kloss in disgust. “No late night calls, no ring-and-hang-up codes, no long-distance connections—ever. It’s like he knew we would look.”</p><p>“Is it possible he did?” asked Miss Swift, meditatively, her clasped hands pressing against her chin as if in prayer, papers fanned out away from her lap like a halo.</p><p>“What do you mean?” asked Selena.</p><p>“I mean, what if he didn’t leave a phone record on purpose? What if he knew that his actions would fall under scrutiny? If Jessie’s disappearance would advantage him in some way, perhaps he was leaving a purposefully clean trail.”</p><p>“You’re suggesting criminal intent, beyond that of a cad,” said Mr. Kloss.</p><p>Miss Swift’s eyebrow raised slightly, though her posture did not change. “Maybe. Maybe not. What do you think?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss, who had long since shed his jacket and toed off his shoes to rest his stocking feet on the edge of the coffee table, shrugged. “It could be something like that. But it could also be, that he is not concealing something, because there is nothing to conceal.”</p><p>“No affair partner at all? No hidden… proclivities?” Miss Swift said, entirely uncertain how the British even referred to these things.</p><p>“Oh, a homosexual? I haven’t the faintest idea,” said Mr. Kloss, waving away the suggestion. “I simply think perhaps there’s no hidden motive, beyond that most inscrutable motive of all.”</p><p>“What motive is that?” asked Thomas.</p><p>“Simple malice,” said Mr. Kloss. “The urge of some men, and here I use the term ‘men’ very loosely indeed, to frighten and harm anything unfortunate enough to fall under their control. It is possible that poor Jessie’s disappearance was both means and end, to a man such as I am describing. I have met a regrettable number of them in my career; they are not at all rare.”</p><p>“I agree.” Miss Swift spoke quietly but decisively. “Instinctively, I sense it. Jessie was terrified when she spoke of him; <em>terrified</em>. The rest of you,” she said, looking to each of the wives in turn, “were shaken, but ready to take action. Jessie was scared out of her wits. I wish more than anything that I had not let her out of my sight.”</p><p>“You couldn’t have known he was ready to act,” Vanessa said solicitously, and Miss Swift clasped her hand.</p><p>“Thank you. But I should have. I should have listened to my instinct that something was very wrong.”</p><p>“Well, you’re listenin’ to it now,” said Miss Kloss. “What does it say?”</p><p>“It says that he would probably have her taken out of town; not to the nearest possible mental hospital, where gossip might spread among the employees about the local girl, but not so far away that he could not regularly travel to check in on her—torture her with the semblance of concern; with false promises of imminent release, conditional upon the satisfaction of impossible demands; with gloating.” Noting the stricken expression on the faces of her audience, she straightened slightly. “Of course, I could be completely wrong, please, don’t mind me, I’m—”</p><p>“Cor,” breathed Sally Timms. “You really ‘ave seen these types of men before, haven’t you.”</p><p>“Yes,” said Miss Swift. “And so we must act as though she is in the hands of a kidnapper, not merely subject to the passing whims of a cad.” She stood up, stepping high to clear the coffee table, and went to the big rolltop desk in the corner of the living room, yanking it open to reveal a few dozen rolled maps. She selected a large green map and a soft grease pencil, returning to the coffee table and spreading the map out over the strewn paperwork. “This is a map of Staffordshire from just before the end of the war, so it should be fairly up to date. We can rule out anything within a close radius of town.” She drew a crude circle around Stafford. “Any hospital located within this circle would necessarily draw the majority of its staff from amongst the locals. Too great a risk of her being recognized. But too far away, and he must give up the ability to see her without effort. He can’t drive it and return in a day; he must get a hotel, and that means there will be local gossip, and questions about why he spends so much of his time away from home. He can drive about thirty miles and still come back home on a weekend, or a weeknight if he is very motivated. Let’s see… thirty miles is about twenty-one inches on this map…”</p><p>“Here,” said Gracie, undoing her bootlace and handing it over to Miss Swift. “We can do this with a string, I remember it from geometry.” Miss Kloss produced a safety pin, with which she affixed the lace to a spot in the center of town (just above the greengrocer’s). Then Gracie, chewing her lip in concentration, drew a perfect circle with the grease pencil, knotted to the other end of the lace.</p><p>“There is our initial search radius,” pronounced Miss Swift with satisfaction. “Every facility outside the smaller circle, and inside the larger one, is a potential place he may have hidden Jessie.” Leaning closer, she peered at the map. “How many hospitals is that?”</p><p>“Well, there’s Cannock Chase,” said Karlie, pointing. Gracie, in a fit of inspiration, removed a stick of tangerine lipstick from her purse and dabbed a tiny smudge on the map at the spot Karlie indicated. Following her lead, every woman removed a stick from their purse and knelt at the map like industrious colourists.</p><p>“The Huntercombe Hospital.”</p><p>“Samuel Johnson in Lichfield.”  </p><p>“Nuffield Heath and the Harplands Hospitals near Stoke-on-Trent.”</p><p>“And the Burton Hospitals in Burton-upon-Trent.”</p><p>“Could he have had her taken as far as South Staffordshire?”</p><p>“Let’s include it, just to be sure,” said Miss Swift, dotting it with a tiny smudge of her own crimson lipstick. Stepping back from the map, they all regarded the colorful array of orange and red and cerise dots with satisfaction.</p><p>“Seven hospitals to investigate,” said Miss Swift. “How hard can it be?”</p><p>“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Kloss.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“I NEVER! Never! <em>Ever!” </em>With every exclamation, Miss Swift yanked another pin from her hair, until she had freed her red flannel Calot hat from its moorings. Then she sent it sailing across the hospital parking lot. Thomas watched it go, its shape contributing to a rather wobbly flight. He looked back at Miss Swift.</p><p>“I don’t know why I did that,” she griped, ruefully doing up a stray ringlet as she frowned at the hat. “I’m just going to have to go and get it again. But it was very satisfying.”</p><p>“Allow me,” said Thomas. He jogged over and scooped the hat from the ground, giving it a light swat to rid it of morning dew. Then he gave a dignified nod to the nurse who had been watching the proceedings from a slight distance, her car keys in hand. “Good morning.”</p><p>“Good morning.”</p><p>He returned the hat to Miss Swift, who had turned quite red. “Let’s get going, shall we?” she muttered to Thomas under her breath.</p><p>“Certainly,” he said fondly, opening the passenger door for her. Once they were out of the gates of Cannock Chase, she let out a gusty sigh. “Well, that marks a first in my career.”</p><p>“Which part?” said Thomas. “The security guards, or the threat to call your father, or the interrogation from the nurse?”</p><p>“Yes,” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“It was rather harrowing when she offered to sedate you,” admitted Thomas. “I was actually wondering if I was about to be in a fight.”</p><p>“That Welsh security guard on the left <strong><em>was</em></strong> horribly burly,” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“Him? Dear God no, I was speaking of the nurse,” said Thomas as Miss Swift snorted. “Did you see her? More than a fair match for Old Swinford’s very <em>worst</em> athlete.”</p><p>“Oh, you were never,” said Miss Swift loyally.</p><p>“Wasn’t I just,” said Thomas. “I believe my schoolmasters moved to have my performance on the fields stricken from the school records lest foreign nations sense the weakness of the King’s youth.”</p><p>“<em>No,” </em>said Miss Swift. “But you’re so graceful! When you’re… erm…” She trailed off, turning bright red.</p><p>“Thank you,” said Thomas, as inside his chest, an exultant beast unleashed its triumphal yawp.  Because he was British, he hastened to conceal his pleasure at the compliment. “I believe it was not a matter of grace, per se, but of distraction. I remain the only alumnus with the distinction of having left a cricket match to enquire after the health of a mother toad.”</p><p>Miss Swift, her equanimity by now much restored, laughed gaily. “And was the mother toad all right?”</p><p>“Yes. I carried her off the pitch in my hands. I still remember the look of intense disappointment upon the cricket master’s face. I think he realized they were never going to make a sportsman of me.”</p><p>“Well, <strong>I</strong> am very glad you were never turned into a sportsman,” said Miss Swift. “Without your bookish tendencies, would you ever have met Ms. Thompson? Or become a private investigator? Or met me?”</p><p>“It’s true. I might have become one of those insufferable old chaps whose best days were in school. Droning on, red-faced, about the good old days of the paddle and the bloody nose.”</p><p>“You could never have been that,” said Miss Swift. “Your inner nature is far too kind, and noble, and good.”<br/>
And Thomas, abashed entirely by her high opinion of him, could finally think of nothing to say.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Any luck at all?” Miss Swift inquired of the group. Thomas noticed that her chipper tone was beginning to fray, just a little, at the edges.</p><p>The defeated silence from the Misses Kloss, Timms, Gomez, Gold and Carlton—plus Cyd and Ms. Thompson—said it all. Miss Swift drooped slightly.</p><p>“You should have seen the stone wall we were greeted with at Nuffield Heath,” said Ms. Thompson, dropping heavily into a chair. “Our receptionist missed her calling as one of the plinths at Karnak.”</p><p>“Mine wouldn’t even speak to me,” said Sally Timms. “Not without a doctor to vouch for the ‘medical legitimacy of my request’. She kept bangin’ on about how people were there to ‘rest’, whatever that means, and that they couldn’t do that with endless visitors bargin’ in to call. If you ask me, it was downright rude.”</p><p>“At least you found someone to talk to, rude as they were,” said Gracie. “My hospital was like a graveyard!”</p><p>“What do you mean?” asked Miss Swift.</p><p>“I mean you couldn’t hear no people. When there are people, ‘specially crazy ones, you at least expect to hear some kind of a commotion—somebody laughing, or crying, or setting up a ruckus. But this was no sound at all, save the receptionist who told me no one there would talk to me. Just creepy, if you ask me.”</p><p>Miss Swift went sliding off her seat on the couch and dove for the map. “Gracie, what hospital did you go to?”</p><p>“The one at Nuffield Heath,” said Gracie. “Why?”</p><p>“Because,” Miss Swift said, circling the hospital in question with two, three swipes of her carmine lipstick, “You have just reported the most interesting clue that any of us have managed to collect. And you have done it by noticing things! Well done!” She finished the circle with a celebratory dot, right over the hospital in question. “What <strong><em>is</em></strong> happening in a hospital with no sounds in it?”</p><p>“Nothing good,” said Ms. Thompson, peering over her spectacles at the map. “Goodness, if that’s the place she’s being held, it’s <em>quite</em> far away, isn’t it? That’s right on the edge of our search radius.”</p><p>“Indeed,” said Miss Swift, consulting her wristwatch. “And with nearly no time left in the day. Ladies, it is nearly six o’clock, and I doubt any of you have eaten a thing. Would you like to regroup in the morning and try at Nuffield Heath again then?”</p><p>Silence greeted her statement. The women looked at each other. “Well, what would be different about tomorrow?” said Sally.</p><p>“Pardon?” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“Well, if they’re not going to talk to Gracie today, what would make them change their minds and talk to us tomorrow?” said Sally. “Seems to me like another tactic is in order.”</p><p>A soft murmur of assent swept the room. Miss Swift, shifting slightly, looked at Thomas out of the corner of her eye. “What did you have in mind?”</p><p>“We should go and try to find a way in,” said Sally forthrightly, raising her chin.</p><p>“<em>Cheers</em> to that.”</p><p>“My thoughts exactly.”</p><p>“I was a boarder in a house for young ladies in Dublin, and we would have been thrown out on the streets if we’d come home after the stroke of nine, or been seen with a gentleman in our rooms, and we <em>still</em> managed to sneak out every night <em>and</em> have parties.”</p><p>“It’s not that hard—”</p><p>“Where there’s a will there’s a way.”</p><p>“Someone <em>always</em> leaves a window unlocked in these type of places.”</p><p>“Or a door—”</p><p>“Think of all the night nurses, they <em>must</em> have boyfriends.”</p><p>“And surely someone will be meeting her beau at an unlocked utility door—”</p><p>“Or a receiving dock for the grocer’s trucks.”</p><p>“And if there’s a fire alarm, we could pull it and they would have to bring everyone out!”</p><p>“Wait, wait,” said Miss Swift, holding up a hand for peace, “I just want to slow everyone down a bit—surely, this can’t be the answer. Ms. Thompson, please. We all trust you as a voice of maturity—guide us?”</p><p>Ms. Thompson smiled. “I was just thinking that breaking in sounds like a marvelous idea.”</p><p>Thomas bit back a smile as Miss Swift looked aghast. “But surely Mr. Kloss would be <em>very</em> shocked at us for even considering this.”</p><p>“Then I suppose it’s better that he’s not here,” said Ms. Thompson crisply. “Come now, you’re an American, have some backbone. Let’s go break some laws.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>As it turned out, law-breaking required quite a bit of getting dressed. First Miss Kloss raised the concern of the ladies’ hair getting caught in hedges and windowscreens and such, which prompted a chaotic search for stocking caps amongst the new divorcees’ baggage. As it was summer, many of them had not thought to pack their winter clothing in the haste of departure, and several girls pressed their good nylons into service, winding the legs tightly around their crowns to turban-like effect. Next, Miss Timms raised the spectre of fingerprints, and everyone went searching for gloves—Ms. Thompson went briefly home to fetch her own gardening gloves, as well as several sturdy torches and a rope ladder which had once been used on a small skiff owned by her ex-husband. By the time the entire party had reassembled, it was nearly eleven o’clock and very dark outside.</p><p>“I’ve just thought of one problem,” said Gracie. “What if someone sees us on the way out to the car?”</p><p>Miss Swift blinked. “And?”</p><p>“And, well, look at us,” said Gracie. “We all look like burglars!”</p><p>Miss Swift looked at the assembled company. Ms. Thompson was wearing a very large and unseasonable mac with gardening gloves. Gracie, Sally, Selena and Vanessa were all wearing turbans of hose; Miss Kloss had found an actual stocking cap.  And Cyd, taking the idea to its logical conclusion, had swaddled herself so thoroughly in scarves, elbow-length gloves, and ancient driving goggles, that not a postage stamp of skin could be seen.</p><p>“We shall simply have to hope that the local constabulary is uninterested,” said Ms. Thompson with a firm air of finality. “Let’s go, before I lose my nerve.”</p><p>In the driveway, there was first a terrible moment of embarrassment as the collective group of nine looked at Ms. Thompson’s modestly sized Austin.</p><p>Ms. Thompson herself broke the silence with a muttered, “Courage, ladies,” before opening all four doors. The Misses Carlton, Timms, Gold and Gomez were all able to slide into the back, with some wedging. Lengthy Miss Kloss eyed the backseat before declaring bravely, “I think I can fit in the footwell, if someone will let me put my legs into their lap.”</p><p>Kind-hearted Miss Gomez, at the end of the line, volunteered to do the honors, and, removing her pointy heels and shimmying like an eel, Miss Kloss slid into place, lying on her back in the footwell.</p><p>“Are you quite comfortable, dear?” called Ms. Thompson from the front seat.</p><p>“Just having a lovely lie-in,” called back Miss Kloss. “Don’t you worry about a thing. Oooooo,” she said as Miss Gomez began to rub her arches. “You do that long enough, I won’t want to leave.”</p><p>Cyd looked at Miss Swift and Thomas. “I will <em>not</em> be fitting in the footwell, but I believe that I can squeeze into the center of the front seat if you two can sit atop each other in the passenger.” Casting them one last level glance before she climbed in, she added, her tone completely flat, “I recommend that the lady take the lap.”</p><p><em>Sotto voce</em>, Thomas muttered to Miss Swift, “Has it ever occurred to you that Cyd might simply be having a laugh at us, all the time, behind that icy façade?”</p><p>Miss Swift gave Thomas an incredulous look. “My darling, did you ever believe she <em>wasn’t</em>?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The drive to Nuffield Heath seemed to take an age, and yet no one in the car spoke, save Miss Swift calling out the directions, so brooding was the preoccupation of all within. It was a pitchy night, and the headlamps of Ms. Thompson’s Ruby sent countless rabbits scurrying for the safety of ditch and hedge. When they arrived at Nuffield Heath, the looming white brick of the hospital’s façade made all the car’s inhabitants shrink—suddenly, they felt like the rabbits.</p><p>“Cor, it’s <em>huge</em>,” breathed Miss Kloss, sitting up in the backseat with the help of the other girls. “How are we ever going to find her in there?”</p><p>Ms. Thompson switched off the lights as the car surmounted the curving drive, creeping forward cautiously. “I don’t know, but has anyone got a good idea where to park?”</p><p>“No, no parking!”</p><p>“They never do in the movies, what if the car doesn’t start again?”</p><p>“All the great bank robbers have a getaway driver.”</p><p>“You must keep the engine warm!”</p><p>“All right, all right, I didn’t know!” exclaimed Ms. Thompson. “I’m new to this.”</p><p>“You must keep the engine purring—”</p><p>“And keep an eye on all the windows of the hospital for security officers with flashlights.”</p><p>“Be ready to honk the horns and alert us if you think we’ve been rumbled—”</p><p>“And flash the lights, so we’ll know where you are!”</p><p>“Be sure to unlock all the car’s doors so that we can jump in quickly, even if you’ve started to move—”</p><p>“And remember where the hospital exit is, so we can make a speedy escape.”</p><p>Ms. Thompson nervously adjusted the fit of her driving gloves. “Oh dear. Perhaps someone else should be the getaway driver.”</p><p>Miss Swift laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said warmly. “You will do <em>splendidly</em>.” Then, with a cry of, “Come, girls!”, she was out the car in a flash, trotting across the parking lot towards the hospital. A moment of confused scrambling, and the rest were out and after her, quiet as wolves following their leader across snow. Locating a service entrance with a window’d door, Miss Swift first tried the doorknob; finding it locked, she slid a pencil out of her purse and gently pried at the bottom edge of the rusty window grate. It gave, and she quickly wedged her slim fingers into the narrow space.</p><p>“Here, help me open it!”</p><p>With the combined strength of Miss Kloss and Miss Gomez, the grate was slowly inched upwards.</p><p>“I think I can fit through it,” Miss Gomez bravely declared, handing off her flashlight to Miss Timms. “Put me through feet-first, I’ll be able to stand.”</p><p>“Are you sure?” said Thomas. “I’m the gentleman, shouldn’t I take the risk in case there’s a great burly security guard on the other side?” The eloquent look given to him by all seven of the young ladies in the party shut him up completely.</p><p>“Here, help lift her up,” Miss Gold instructed the rest of the party. “Carefully. Support her head.” With little difficulty, Miss Gomez was bundled through the window, and a brief second later the door was unlocked from within.</p><p>“Come in,” she whispered. “It’s a kitchen.”</p><p>The kitchen turned out to be quite labrynthian, and full of obstacles—at one point, Miss Timms caught her sleeve on a stack of hotel pans, which, for a heartstopping moment, threatened to overturn onto the tiles. But Miss Gold’s catlike reflexes saved the day—she caught the stack one-handed, restoring it to its place. At the door out to the hallway, there was a brief, whispered conference.</p><p>“Shall we all spread out?” said Thomas. “We might find her faster.”</p><p>“Oh, we’d definitely find her faster,” said Miss Kloss, “but what then? How would the others know she’d been found?”</p><p>“We must have a means of alarm,” said Miss Swift. “A signal that all of us can make. Perhaps a shrill call?”</p><p>“That would bring all the orderlies and nurses running,” pointed out Vanessa.</p><p>“I can blow between my wrists to make the sound of an owl,” said Selena slowly.</p><p>“Do you think you could teach us all, very quickly?” said Miss Swift. A brief silence, as everyone looked at her very doubtfully.</p><p> </p><p>“So, sticking together, then.”</p><p>“Yes. That’s probably for the best.”</p><p> </p><p>Opening the kitchen door, the group, lead by Miss Swift, snuck down the service corridor and into a stairwell, where they all promptly froze when a door higher up in the stairwell opened. Thankfully, no descending footsteps—it was only an orderly, stepping into the stairwell for a private smoke. They sat on the steps, directly underneath him, waiting in silence, until he had finished his cigarette and gone back into the ward.</p><p>“All right,” whispered Miss Swift. “Let’s try one floor at a time and move up.”</p><p>The first floor turned out to be nothing but administrative offices, all darkened for the night.</p><p>“This place gives me the collywobbles,” said Miss Kloss, and Miss Swift agreed.</p><p>“Let’s get up to the second floor.”</p><p>The second floor turned out to be another long corridor, dim as a submarine, with a nurses’ station lit like a stadium at the far end. Lining the corridor were small patient rooms, each with a round window.</p><p>“If one of those nurses even glances down here, we’re done for,” muttered Miss Kloss to Miss Swift, and the rest of the group piled up behind them in the stairwell agreed.</p><p>“Shh,” said Miss Gomez. “Wait.”</p><p>“Wait—why?”</p><p>“Just shh!” Miss Gomez leaned forward, listening intently. A tiny frown creased her forehead. “I think…. yes, now we’re safe.”</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“Can’t you hear it?”</p><p>They all strained. Slowly, smiles broke across their faces as they recognized the ragged strains of ‘Happy Birthday’ floating down the hall.</p><p>“That means there’s cake.”</p><p>“And drink.”</p><p>“No one’s leaving that nurses’ station for at least a quarter of an hour. Let’s go,” said brave Miss Gomez, nudging them out of the stairwell. Fanning out, the group checked each window, tiptoeing nearer and nearer to the nurses’ station, with no luck—at each window, hope turned to disappointment as the dim nightlights revealed only elderly women, sickly-looking children, and men. At the last window, Sally Timms beckoned Miss Swift over to her, pointing excitedly at the bed within.</p><p>“Is that her?” she mouthed as Miss Swift crept to the window. “I never met her.”</p><p>Miss Swift peered at the young woman lying motionless inside, only to sink back down on her heels in disappointment. Shaking her head <em>no</em>, she beckoned the others and crept back down the hall to the stairwell. After the door was securely closed behind them, she let out a small sigh of disappointment. “I really thought she would be there.”</p><p>“Well, don’t lose heart,” said Thomas, dropping a kiss atop her head. “We have two more floors to go.”</p><p>The third floor was dark and quiet, with a withered orderly fast asleep on a melamine chair at the end of the hall. Miss Gold, swift-thinking as always, held up a finger to shush the others behind her, then removed her shoes and tiptoed down the hallway in her stocking feet, leading all the other women to do the same. Thomas had barely gotten his Oxfords unlaced before the women returned. “Don’t bother,” Sally Timms whispered to him on the way back into the stairwell. ‘She’s not here.”</p><p>The fourth and final floor had only four patient rooms in it, and Miss Swift wilted a little when she saw. But the third of those rooms had a woman in it, dark and curled in a hopeless fetal shape on her bed, and this was Jessie.</p><p>Miss Gold tried the door—locked. “Damn,” she hissed frantically under her breath, rattling the knob a little more, until level-minded Cyd placed her cool hand over Gracie’s.</p><p>“Wait.” Withdrawing her hand from her glove, she rapped delicately on the glass of the room. Not a firm, authoritative rap, it was the kind of hesitant tap that a shy friend might give, and it worked; Jessie’s head rose from the pillow. After a brief moment of bleary staring, in which she appeared to be trying to work out who the group at her door was, she got out of bed and fumbled, in the darkness, to the door. A brief rattle, and it was confirmed—the door was locked from the other side, too. Jessie’s eyes, framed by the round window, were wide and frightened.</p><p>“Don’t worry,” mouthed Miss Swift. To the team surrounding her, she said decisively, “We are <em>going</em> to get her out of there. Ideas?”</p><p>“I have a hairpin!” exclaimed Miss Kloss, reaching up to unfasten the slippery mass of her hair where it was tucked under her stocking cap. “Here, would this help?”</p><p>She passed it to Miss Gold, who looked bewildered. “What am I supposed to do with this?”</p><p>A chorus of hissed whispers answered her.</p><p>“What do you mean?”</p><p>“Haven’t you ever broken in anywhere?”</p><p>“Pick the lock!”</p><p>“Hurry!”</p><p> “I’ve never picked a lock!” whispered Miss Gold. “Which end am I supposed to use?”</p><p>“Here, give it to me,” hissed Miss Timms, budging her out of the way. “I had a very strict governess,” she explained, inserting the hairpin into the keyhole and applying downward pressure, her lips pursed in intense concentration. The entire group held its breath. There was no ‘click’; no telltale rattle of tumblers; instead, the door swung open as silently as a dream. For a moment, the group and Jessie stared at each other, wordless, each expecting the hospital to erupt in a chaos of alarms. When it did not, Thomas felt a bit foolish standing there and whispered, “Hallo.”</p><p>Miss Swift, her eyes brimming with tears, finished his thought: “We’ve come to get you out of here.”</p><p>And Jessie rushed into her arms.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Ms. Thompson was without her glasses, and so had to lean forward and squint when she saw the first traces of movement in the pitchy dark at the far end of the parking lot—was it a security guard, or a whole phalanx of orderlies? Her fingers tightened nervously upon the wheel, then loosened as she recognized first Miss Kloss, then Miss Swift, and then the entire gaggle of wives, Cyd and Thomas bringing up the rear. In their midst, a dark figure in a set of white pajamas, bundled into one of the girls’ coats. “Hullo there,” said Thomas, opening the passenger side door. “We have another fare for you.”</p><p>“The more, the merrier,” Ms. Thompson responded gamely as the girls tumbled into the backseat, Miss Kloss slotting herself again into the footwell. To Jessie, she said, “You’re a slight little thing, and that’s good, because I believe you’ll be traveling on their laps.”</p><p>“Just as long as I’m traveling away from this place,” said Jessie with fervent conviction.</p><p>“There’s a good lass. In you go.” To Thomas, Ms. Thompson muttered, “Thank goodness you’re here, another five minutes and my nerves would have been completely shattered.”</p><p>“Nonsense, you’re an oak,” said Thomas, as Miss Swift, the final piece of the puzzle, clambered on top of his lap and pulled the passenger door shut behind herself. “Shall we?”</p><p>“Undoubtedly,” responded Ms. Thompson, throwing the Seven Ruby into gear and starting the long drive towards home. At first, tense silence reigned, but as Nuffield Heath melted away without incident or pursuit, the quiet became more nuanced. No one wished to be the one to break Jessie’s sense of peace, or to subject her to interrogation. And so it remained until she herself was the one to speak:</p><p>“How did you find me?”</p><p>Twisting round on Thomas’s lap, Miss Swift pushed up her stocking cap. “It was truly a marvelous stroke of insight on Miss Gold’s part.”</p><p>“Miss Gold?”</p><p>“Oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t met everybody yet. Gracie Gold, this is Jessie, and here is Vanessa Mayer, Sally Timms, Selena Gomez, Cousin Cyd, and of course you know Miss Kloss already. And this is Thomas, and this of course is Ms. Thompson.”</p><p>“Pleased to make your acquaintance, dearie,” said Ms. Thompson, navigating the tricky roundabout in the center of Calf Heath.</p><p>“Pleased to meet you all,” said Jessie, shaking every hand she could reach, a gesture made awkward by the fact that she was lying across several of their laps. “And thank you so much. What was Gracie’s insight?”</p><p>“Oh yes! Gracie, explain.”</p><p>“I didn’t really have the insight,” said Gracie apologetically. “I just noticed that the hospital was silent. Miss Swift here was the one to point out that a hospital should have noises.”</p><p>“A thought that would never have occurred without your keen observational skills,” rejoined Miss Swift.</p><p>“And you understood to look for me there, just from the quiet?” said Jessie, sounding baffled.</p><p>“Oh no,” said Miss Kloss. “It were a whole series of deductions. First we realized that Doctor Gottwald was in the committin’ business, as it were—”</p><p>“—Which brought all of us together—”</p><p>“That’s true, all of us were in the same boat and didn’t know it until Miss Swift here brought us together—”</p><p>“And got us divorces—”</p><p>“On the grounds of cruelty, which was ever so clever—”</p><p>“You see, you weren’t the only one—”</p><p>“Not by a fair yard.”</p><p>“We were all over a barrel by the time Miss Swift came in—”</p><p>“And Mister Hiddleston, we shan’t forget him—”</p><p>“Oh of course—and Miss Kloss and Mister Kloss who isn’t here tonight, he’s the one who stood up for us in court and acted as our attorney, I reckon he’ll be yours too—”</p><p>“Wait, wait, wait,” said Jessie, holding up both her hands in a slowing motion. “What do you mean you were all in the same boat and didn’t know it? You all got divorces? Who is Mister Kloss? I don’t understand any of this,” she said plaintively, her voice nearing a wail.</p><p>Ms. Thompson, looking in the mirror, became very stern indeed: “And of course you are confused, sweetheart. You have undergone a terrible ordeal, and these women are making no more sense than a gaggle of sixth-formers. Cyd, explain. The rest of you, kindly shut up.”</p><p>“Yes’m,” said Cyd, twisting in her seat to look into the rear of the vehicle. “First off, you weren’t the only woman in Stafford whose husband was consulting with Doctor Gottwald without her knowledge…”</p><p>The little Austin Seven plunged on into the night, and Cyd had nearly finished unfolding her tale when Ms. Thompson pulled up to the florist’s shop where Miss Swift, Miss Kloss, and the wives were staying. They were almost all out of the car when Cyd paused, turning to Miss Swift with a quizzical look. “Wait. Why have we taken her here?”</p><p>“What?” said Miss Swift.</p><p>“She is still married to Mr. Brown legally, is she not?”</p><p>“Yes,” said Miss Swift, instinctively and protectively putting her arm around Jessie to draw her close. “But surely you can’t think we should return her to—”</p><p>“Of course not,” said Cyd. “But she isn’t safe here, either. He will have found out by now that you and Miss Kloss are helping wives escape their husbands. He may come here, looking for her.”</p><p>Miss Swift looked reluctantly up at the little apartment above the florist’s, so warm and cozy, her bed so close. “You’re right,” she admitted to Cyd. “Girls, I’m sorry, but she’s completely right. Until we are sure Jessie, and indeed all of you, are out of danger, we must take every possible precaution and find a new spot for every single one of you to stay.”</p><p>“Hear, hear,” said Miss Timms, and Vanessa and Gracie and Selena all joined the chorus. </p><p>“Let’s make another plan,” said Miss Kloss. “My father and I have a camper van hidden in the back garden. It’s small, but it will make a perfectly cozy temporary home for someone.” Vanessa volunteered for this spot.</p><p>“If you don’t mind sharing, my bed is large enough,” said Cyd, and Miss Swift, quite overcome with emotion, placed her hands on Cyd’s shoulders.</p><p>“And to think I was intimidated by you at first,” she said, beaming. “You are a treasure. Pure gold.”</p><p>“I’ll take that spot,” said Sally, stepping up to Cyd’s side. “I’m told I’m a dead sleeper.”</p><p>“Now,” said Miss Swift, looking over her shoulder at Thomas for encouragement, “I know it’s quite unusual for a bachelor to host a whole gaggle of women, but I think that I can speak for both Thomas and myself when I say—”</p><p>“That of course there will be room for guests at my place,” Thomas said firmly. “I can offer my room to two, and can even stretch as far as a promise of clean sheets.” To Miss Swift he said, “I hope you won’t mind sharing the couch with me, it’s survived two world wars with only the <em>slightest</em> loss of horsehair.”</p><p>“Certainly,” said Miss Swift, looking up at him with stars in her eyes.</p><p>Ms. Thompson looked at Thomas in amazement. “That horsehair lounge of yours is the stuff of nightmares,” she informed him, “and any girl who agrees to share it with you is either in the depths of the most profound delusion, or is marriage material. As this one seems sensible, I suggest you make a proposal before the nation’s eligible nobility takes notice of her.” Leaving Thomas glubbering like a fish, Ms. Thompson turned her attention to Jessie. “So it’s settled. You’ll be coming home with me.”</p><p>Jessie looked faint. “I will?”</p><p>“Well of course, girl. Do you think we’d put you in a garden shed? Come now, I have a nice second bedroom that’s been going to waste ever since my son moved away. Can you all get to your various homes afoot? I think we had better get Miss Jessie to bed as soon as possible, as she’s had a tiring day.” As she shepherded the exhausted Jessie back into her car, she muttered to Selena and Gracie, “I think we can all agree that Master Hiddleston’s bachelor pad might be one shock too many.” Then she winked, and got in the car with Jessie, and was off.</p><p> </p><p>Gathering up the wives’ belongings was the work of a moment, as each had brought no more than a pair of suitcases. Miss Swift gathered all the documents relating to the wives in a large accordion folder, then locked the apartment up snugly and pocketed the small brass key. Then she hugged Miss Kloss. “Please don’t worry. It’s just a precaution. We’ll secure Jessie her divorce tomorrow and be back to business before you know it.”</p><p>Miss Kloss waited until Sally and Cyd were safely headed down the street and Selena and Gracie were engaged in conversation with Thomas before responding. “If you believed that, you would only have hidden Jessie instead of stashing us in separate places all through town.” She put her hand on Miss Swift’s shoulder. “It’s all right to admit that you’re scared. You ‘ave good reason to be.”</p><p>Miss Swift sighed. “I must admit to you that I haven’t told you every reason I am afraid. I am terribly sorry, with all the… everything that has been going on, I never realized that I had not told you about the threatening phone call that Thomas received a few days ago. Male caller, refused to identify himself, calling from Coventry. Told Thomas to cease interference, then hung up.”</p><p>Miss Kloss’s eyebrows rose. “That’s all?”</p><p>“I know, it’s terribly tame by American standards. We received so many of those kinds of calls back in New York that it completely slipped my mind. It didn’t occur to me until today that it might signify greater danger here, given English reticence.”</p><p>Miss Kloss frowned, thinking it over. “That makes sense. But he called Thomas’s apartment, not us. Should you be taking Selena and Gracie back there with you? What if it’s one of their husbands?”</p><p>Miss Swift shook her head minutely. “I’m almost certain that it’s not. Both Selena and Gracie’s husbands are simple hounds. They’ve spent every evening since their wives left at the Red Lion boarding house, according to Bertha and Cynthia at the switchboard. I would have taken Sally too, had she not gone off with Cyd.”</p><p>“Oh right, her husband was the juggler, weren’t he,” said Miss Kloss.</p><p>“Mister Bette Petra Elizabeth Alice, just so. I don’t think he’s even noticed the absence in the rotation. No, I don’t think any of those three have the sand to make such a threat. My three suspects are Jessie’s husband Jackson, Mister Mayer, and Tristan, Ms. Thompson’s wretched son. In that order,” she clarified. “No, I think that of all our wives, the only ones in danger are Jessie and possibly Vanessa.”</p><p>Miss Kloss nodded. “Right, then. I’ll set up a code knock with Vanessa and make sure the camper van and the back garden are locked up tight as houses. Give her room on my bedroom floor, if she’ll take it.”</p><p>“Don’t alarm her, just secure her.”</p><p>“What about Ms. Thompson? Are you sure Jessie is safe with her?”</p><p>“On that front, I have no worries whatsoever,” Miss Swift said truthfully. “Jessie will be as safe as if she were in the Tower of London.”</p><p>“All right,” said Miss Kloss, and gave Miss Swift a warm hug. “Try not to worry <em>too</em> much. We’re going to nail this bastard, ‘ooever he is.”</p><p>“All right,” Miss Swift agreed, and Miss Kloss left for home, taking Vanessa with her. Slipping her arm through Thomas’s elbow, Miss Swift turned her very brightest and most cheerful smile on Selena and Gracie. “Now then. Shall we?”</p><p> </p><p>Later that night, as she and Thomas rested on his (admittedly very lumpy) horsehair sofa, Miss Swift pillowed her cheek upon Thomas’s heart, listening to the warm and healthy thrum of blood, its true and constant beat.</p><p>“You can tell me what’s on your mind, you know,” he whispered after some time into the blue darkness. “I’m awake.”</p><p>She snugged her arms a little tighter around his lanky frame. “I’m wondering if Jessie and Vanessa ever lay like this with their husbands, feeling utterly at peace and safe in their choices, and if so, when it all went wrong. Was it gradual? Did they ever sense it, beforehand? Or were they just like us?”</p><p>Thomas heard, but did not comment on, the microscopic pause he detected before ‘us’. He closed his eyes, mulling over the question as it had clearly occurred to her: <em>Were they just like me? </em>It was only natural that, surrounded by women who had fallen prey to terrible cads, she should interrogate her own circumstances closely. He tightened his arms around her shoulders, trying to warm her against the unseasonable chill leaking through the living room window. He really must invest in a tube of caulk. And learn how to use caulk. And find out what caulk was, really. There was a whole list of things to do before he could reasonably ask Miss Swift to share his home, much as his secret inner self cried out that Ms. Thompson was right, that he should <em>ask her,</em> <em>ask her now, do it right away</em>.</p><p>He felt her eyelashes prickle against his throat and realized that he was rather neglecting his duty to comfort her. “I think they most likely felt perfectly safe,” he answered honestly. “That is part of the horror of it. They felt they were safe, and yet they were not. But you are,” he said, with all the feeling and truth in his heart, and pressed a kiss to the peak of her forehead. “You are,” he whispered, feeling the warmth of his own breath reflecting from her skin, smelling the warm and mingled perfume unique to them, together. Feeling her body relax and her breathing give way to the soft nighttime rhythm that was hers alone. Feeling himself tugged into sleep behind the one woman he would follow into oblivion itself.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The next morning, Thomas awoke to a ringing phone. Before he could fully rouse himself from sleep, Miss Swift had stretched to reach the receiver.</p><p>“Yes. Yes, I see,” she was saying, her forehead creased in concern. Thomas sat up, his mind quickly clearing as he read her expression.</p><p>“No, thank <em>you</em>, Cyd. I appreciate you very much. Yes. Yes, I’ll keep in touch. Thank you.” She hung up the phone.</p><p>“Bad news?”</p><p>“Rather. There was a break-in last night. Nancy—she’s the florist—came in this morning and found the glass broken out of the little pane in the door leading up to my apartment. Cyd says the police are there right now. I’d better go over.”</p><p>“I’ll come with you,” said Thomas, reaching for his clothing.</p><p>“Thank you,” said Miss Swift. “But I’d rather not leave any of the wives alone. You stay here with Selena and Gracie. Make them one of your wonderful breakfasts. Calm their nerves. I won’t be an hour.” She tucked her hair up underneath her hat and applied fresh lipstick. “There. Do I look a wreck?”</p><p>“You look as beautiful as ever,” Thomas told her. “But I don’t like this one bit. Please let me come with you?”</p><p>“You are sweet, but no. Selena and Gracie aren’t used to this sort of thing, not like I am. When they hear what’s happened, they’ll be very frightened, and it will be good that you’re here. I won’t be long.”</p><p>She kissed him, grabbed her straw pocketbook, and was gone. Thomas stood at loose ends for several minutes. Should he have gone with her? Intellectually, he understood that Selena and Gracie were vulnerable; intellectually, he knew that nothing was likely to happen to Miss Swift in broad daylight on a Wednesday morning in Stafford; intellectually, he knew the responsible thing to do was to stay. Emotionally, however, he was wrestling with the urge to lock Miss Swift in a very high castle keep until he could find and personally execute the man—or men—responsible for the breakin, for Jessie’s commitment, for this entire miserable situation. Intellectually, Thomas realized that such a task might require him to murder a sizeable portion of Stafford before Miss Swift could be allowed down from her castle keep, and that she would be unlikely to acquiesce to such a scheme. Still.</p><p>Hearing a slight rustling from the direction of the bedroom, he resolved to funnel his nervous energy into the production of a massive breakfast, and promptly broke three eggs on the way out of the icebox. As he was mopping up the mess, the phone rang, sending him rocketing into the open icebox door—clutching his scalp and cursing, he limped to pick it up.</p><p>“Hallo?”</p><p>“You should have listened when I told you to drop it.” The line went dead.</p><p>Thomas set the receiver down. Muttered, “No. No, there has been quite enough of this.” Picked the receiver back up again. “Yes, operator, can you confirm where the last call connected came from? Coventry? Thank you.”</p><p>He hung up rather savagely and stalked into the kitchen, where he proceeded to prepare an operatically excessive breakfast. By the time Miss Selena and Miss Gracie had arose and shuffled, yawning, into the kitchen, he had made eggs Florentine, a mountain of crepes, hot coffee, cold pressed orange juice, sausages, grilled tomato halves, tea, a dish of salted roast kippers with toast fingers, and was making a brave attempt at a meringue when he was startled by the appearance of the women.</p><p>“Ladies! Ah, drat it,” he said, peering into the bowl, where his egg whites were retreating from his cream of tartar. “Blast this humidity, it’s ruined my peak.”</p><p>“Nevermind that, what is all <em>this</em>?” said Selena, gesturing towards the table, her eyes like saucers.</p><p>“Oh, please, do sit,” said Thomas, abandoning the meringue to pull out chairs. “This is breakfast. Do you ladies take coffee, or tea?”</p><p>“But this is outrageous,” said Gracie. “Whose battalion is coming to breakfast?”</p><p>“Erm,” said Thomas, fetching napkins. “I may have gotten <em>slightly</em> carried away. Cream and sugar?”</p><p>“If my husband had made breakfasts like this for me, I might’ve been willing to overlook the attempted institutionalization,” said Selena, reaching eagerly for the crepe dish.</p><p>“Hear, hear,” said Gracie, forking sausages onto everyone’s plates. “Three cheers for the chef!”</p><p>Both women let out a hearty cheer, and Thomas colored as he ducked his head over his coffee.</p><p>“Where did you learn to cook like this?” asked Selena.</p><p>“My father,” said Thomas. “He was the head waiter at the Langham for nearly twenty years. You pick up all sorts of knowledge there, going into the kitchen. I suppose he must have seen nearly every dish they made, at every stage in its making. That’s where he met my mother. She was dressing hair in the hotel salon.”</p><p>“Master Hiddleston, you are a wealth of hidden knowledge,” said Gracie, craning to look into the dish of sausages. “Next you’ll be telling us that you can set and style hair.”</p><p>“I can, actually,” said Thomas, and Selena choked on her breakfast.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“It looks like they weren’t very interested in your valuables,” said Officer T. Holland, an alarmingly fresh-faced young patrolman who clung to his steno pad as a castaway clings to his life raft.</p><p>“Mmm? Why’s that?” said Miss Swift, distracted by her mental inventory of missing papers in the broken and vacant wooden secretary.</p><p>“Well, begging your pardon, but I’ve just noticed a few of the things around here and most thieves don’t leave a complete set of silver and two sets of pearls behind,” said Officer Holland, coloring slightly. “Not that I—went through. Well. We’re supposed to… why don’t you tell me what you see that’s missing.”</p><p>Miss Swift straightened up crisply. “In fact, I’d already reached exactly the same conclusion as you, Officer. I agree, whoever they were, they weren’t after our things. Though, confidentially speaking, that silver is only Sheffield plate,” she added, and the policeman looked abashed.</p><p>“I’m sorry, materials were my worst subject. Would you like to give me an inventory of the missing items?”</p><p>“Well, that will present an obstacle,” Miss Swift said carefully. “Officer Holland, can I ask you to maintain some confidence?”</p><p>“Of course.”</p><p>“I think the thief was after something very particular. You see, I’m a private investigator, and I’m currently managing a rather delicate case. As such, I’m guessing that the intruder wouldn’t have cared about my jewelry or my silver or anything like that. I think they were looking for my notes on the case.”</p><p>Officer Holland nodded. “That makes sense. And, can you tell me, did they find them?”</p><p>They both looked towards the empty secretary. “Yes, I’m afraid they did,” said Miss Swift. “Unfortunately. But I hope you’ll understand why, as a matter of record, I wouldn’t be able to give you much more detail than ‘confidential notes and documents’.  It wouldn’t do to betray my clients’ trust by describing them further.”</p><p>“Of course, of course,” said Officer Holland, tripping over his words in an effort to be agreeable. Then he reached the conclusion of his thought, and his brow wrinkled up. “But wait. If you can’t tell me what you’re missing, how can the police help you find it?”</p><p>Miss Swift was already making her way to the door. “Not to worry,” she called gaily over her shoulder. “They can’t.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The epic breakfast was just groaning to a close when Miss Swift returned to Thomas’s apartment, shedding her hat in the doorway with a sigh. In a flash, Thomas was down the stairs to divest her of her overcoat and kiss her on the cheek. “Darling. I’m so glad you’re back. I’ve popped a plate in the warmer for you, it should still be tasty.”</p><p>“Oh, you’re a treasure, but right now there’s only one thing I want,” Miss Swift responded. Some time later, they parted dreamily, and she reached up to thumb away the crimson smudge her lipstick had left on his mouth.</p><p>“Was the break-in very bad?” he asked, his tone low in case either of the wives were listening.</p><p>“Oh, not very bad at all,” she said. “It was a lucky thing we brought all our notes on the wives’ investigation. They only got the maps where we marked the hospitals, and my grandmother’s sketch of the family seal.” She said that last bit rather quickly, but Thomas had not been making a study of Miss Swift’s every facet for nothing, and her disappointment was obvious.</p><p>“Oh, darling,” he said, embracing her tightly and rubbing his hands up and down her long back. “I’m so sorry. What an absolutely rotten thing to have stolen.”</p><p>“Oh, it’s not the worst thing.” Miss Swift’s voice was somewhat muffled by Thomas’s shirtfront. “It’s not as though it affects anyone living, you know.”</p><p>“It affects <em>you</em>, and you are living,” Thomas said, and Miss Swift’s eyes began to brim over with tears. “Oh, my darling. There, there,” he said, thumbing away the drops and reclasping her under his chin. “I know. It hurts.”</p><p>“It’s so stupid of me,” she said thickly into his neck.</p><p>“It’s not,” said Thomas. “But let me show you something which may cheer you?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In his bedroom, Thomas switched on an old banker’s lamp over his working desk, and spent several minutes sifting through a snowdrift of papers before he found the one he wanted, clasped in a book of guild emblems. “Here it is.”</p><p>Miss Swift took the drawing, her eyes filling with tears as she took it in. “You traced it.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“It’s wonderful. When did you make it?”</p><p>“The second day we met. Ms. Thompson encouraged me to make several copies; in fact, six.”</p><p>“Six? Why six?”</p><p>“Because five of them were sent to the country’s leading experts on seals, guild emblems, and society insignia. I promise you, we <strong>will </strong>find this marker somewhere. You haven’t hit a dead end. Just a snag.”</p><p>“Thank you,” said Miss Swift, and as she kissed him again and again, she repeated it with increasing fervor. “Thank you. <em>Thank you.</em> Thomas. Thank you.”<br/>
<br/>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“You again,” said Judge Broadbent. “Back to divorce the other half of the village?”</p><p> “Not quite half,” said Mister Kloss. “Only a small fraction, and hopefully the last.”</p><p>“We can only hope,” said Judge Broadbent, peering through his spectacles at the folder in front of him. Seated directly behind Mr. Kloss, Miss Kloss and Miss Swift flanked Jessie, their arms wound protectively around her shoulders. Behind them, Ms. Thompson and Thomas perched on the very edge of the second row of seats. It was a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and the town court was quiet and peaceful—a blessing, as Jessie seemed near-collapse.</p><p>Judge Broadbent took his time reading the petition. “It says here that the petitioner was committed to Nuffield Heath for two days.”</p><p>“That’s correct,” said Mr. Kloss. Only someone who knew him very well would have noticed the tiny wince that preceded the response, almost like a twinge of toothache.</p><p>“And now she is here, before me.”</p><p>“Also correct.” Miss Kloss drew in sharp breath, and Miss Swift, on Jessie’s other side, did the same. They had been hoping to avoid this line of questioning.</p><p>Judge Broadbent whipped off his spectacles and pinned Jessie with his glare. “Well, come on. Don’t keep me waiting. Why is she here, and not in Nuffield Heath? Where are her discharge papers? Where is the consulting physician’s report? Why, in short, is she here in my courtroom?”</p><p>“Ah,” said Mr. Kloss. “To be frank, your honor, my client’s release from Nuffield Heath was as unconventional as we believe her commitment to be illegitimate; which is to say, entirely.”</p><p>Judge Broadbent looked over his glasses. “Speak plainly, man.”</p><p>“She did a bunk.”</p><p>“Ah,” said Judge Broadbent. “I see. And was she assisted?”</p><p>“She was.”</p><p>“By whom was she assisted?”</p><p>“By her friends, some of whom you see here,” said Mr. Kloss, gesturing to the rows behind him.</p><p>“I see. Were you among them?”</p><p>“I was not, nor was I aware of their plans,” said Mr. Kloss, looking over his shoulder at the group. “However,” he said, turning back to the judge. “I would be lying if I said I did not support their choice entirely.”</p><p>“Hmph,” said Judge Broadbent. “And do we know, in light of this, any of the details of Mrs Brown’s commitment? Who put her in, what the stated cause was, who the attending physician was, any of it?”</p><p>“We do. Jessie’s husband Jackson consulted with Dr. Gottwald to obtain a recommendation for confinement. She was taken by surprise, at her home, by a contingent of orderlies from Nuffield Heath, last Sunday,” said Mr. Kloss.</p><p>“Mmm,” said Judge Broadbent. “Sunday, eh?”</p><p>“Indeed.”</p><p>The judge and the lawyer shared a momentary silence pulsing with disapproval.</p><p>“What then?”</p><p>“My client was much surprised. She had made no complaint to her husband medically, nor had she consulted Doctor Gottwald herself. She had, however, overheard enough conversations between her husband and Doctor Gottwald to be alarmed, and to have engaged Miss Swift to investigate.”</p><p>“Yes, it seems Miss Swift has rather cornered the market of alarmed wives in this jurisdiction,” grumbled Judge Broadbent. “We’ll get to that. What happened when the orderlies arrived?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“My client barricaded herself in her room with a chair and dialed the phone operator.”</p><p>“What did you do that for, girl?” Judge Broadbent addressed his question to Jessie, who bit her lip.</p><p>“I thought I might reach Miss Swift. I couldn’t remember her number but I hoped the girls on the switchboard might help me.”</p><p>“And did they?”</p><p>“They didn’t get a chance,” said Jessie. “They broke down my door and pulled me out of the room.”</p><p>“Who did? Your husband?”</p><p>“No, he was in the living room. It was the orderlies, from the hospital.”</p><p>“They broke through your bedroom door?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Explain how they did that.”</p><p>“They kicked it several times, until the wood in the bottom panel began to splinter, and then the chair fell over.”</p><p>“So they damaged your house as they were trying to get to you.”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“All right, what were you doing while they were kicking the door?”</p><p>“I was screaming,” Jessie whispered. “I was screaming for the girls on the switchboard to send help, and trying to wedge myself under the bed.”</p><p>“Hmm,” said Judge Broadbent. “Why under the bed?”</p><p>“I thought maybe I could make it harder for them to get at me there, but there was a lot of stuff under the bed and I couldn’t get under it in time.”</p><p>“What happened next?”</p><p>“They all came in. There was three or four of them, and they grabbed my wrists and ankles and pulled me away from the bed.”</p><p>“And then?”</p><p>“They dragged me down the stairs to their van on the sidewalk. I screamed at everyone on the way past, everyone I could think of. I called to my neighbors, both sides and across the street, and I told them I was being kidnapped and I didn’t know these men and please to help me.”</p><p>“Did any of them respond?”</p><p>“No. They just stood there and stared.”</p><p>“Hmmph,” said Judge Broadbent. “And what about your husband. You said he was in the living room for all of this. Did he say anything to you about why the orderlies were there?”</p><p>“No. He was reading.”</p><p>“Reading?”</p><p>Jessie nodded. “He didn’t even look up at me. It was like I was a <em>thing</em>.”</p><p>“Mmm,” said Judge Broadbent, making a tiny notation on his legal pad. “And what happened when you got to the hospital?”</p><p>“It was fast. They pulled me into the lobby and one of the men said, it’s Mrs. Brown, and the nurse unlocked the door to the rooms, and then they stuck me with a needle full of something, and weighed and measured me, and then I was put in a room.”</p><p>“Hmm,” said Judge Broadbent. “And could you open the door to your room?”</p><p>“No. It was locked.”</p><p>“Did it remain locked for all the time you were inside?”</p><p>“They brought me some meals, and the nurses came back to give me pills that they made me take and watched me swallow, but when those weren’t happening, the door stayed locked.”</p><p>“And at any point during the time you were there, did you see or speak to Doctor Gottwald, or any other physician?”</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“What did you do to pass the time?”</p><p>“I slept a lot.”</p><p>“Did the pills make you sleepy?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>“Tell me about when you left the hospital.”</p><p>Jessie looked to Mr. Kloss, who nodded.</p><p>“It was nighttime. I was lying on my bed, half-asleep, and there was a knock on the door. I went to the door and Miss Swift was there, with Mister Thomas and all the other girls.”</p><p>“All the other girls meaning…” Judge Broadbent addressed his remark to Miss Swift, who responded.</p><p>“Meaning Cyd and Karlie and the other wives.”</p><p>“The other wives—what, you mean the four you had me divorce last week?”<br/>
“The same.”</p><p>“Why in the name of heaven did you bring all of them with you?”</p><p>“They wanted to come,” Miss Swift replied steadily. “In fact, they insisted. They all—we all—felt a bond.”</p><p>“Hrmmm,” said Judge Broadbent. “Mister Kloss. It cannot have escaped your notice that your client’s friends are essentially confessing to criminal trespass.”</p><p>“It has not, Your Honor.”</p><p>“And that, should I continue to allow them to unfold their little adventure story, that further crimes, including I am assuming breaking and entering, should accrue to their reputations.”</p><p>“I am aware, Your Honor.”</p><p>“So, shall we skip to the part where you tell me why I ought to overlook all of this?”</p><p>Mr. Kloss cleared his throat. “It is our position that Jessie’s internment in the hospital itself was legally invalid, and that as such, any attempts to release her from her unjust situation should be regarded as efforts to right a wrong, a situation in which there is some precedent for judicial leeway.”</p><p>“Moving your neighbor’s inconveniently parked car is leeway. This is breaking and entering by eight people.”</p><p>“Only one person broke and entered, Your Honor,” Miss Swift piped up, and Thomas frantically sucked in breath over his teeth. Ignoring him, she continued. “I picked all the locks and made first entry into every door. All the others followed me.”</p><p>“Even if I believed that, Miss Swift, which I do <em>not</em>,” Judge Broadbent informed her sternly, “it would not make a difference. None of your companions were supposed to be there, and all of them entered private property, unauthorized, at night, through locks which had to be picked or broken open. You knew what you were doing, and so did they. I suggest you allow your lawyer to do the talking.”</p><p>Chastened, Miss Swift sat back, though Thomas noted a dangerous tension roiling the muscles in her jaw.</p><p>Judge Broadbent continued. “Mrs. Brown. Is it your desire to be separated, legally, from your husband?”</p><p>“Yes,” Jessie whispered.</p><p>“And is that a desire that is entirely yours? You haven’t been convinced, or persuaded, by anyone here?”</p><p>“Now wait just a—” Miss Swift said, beginning to rise before Miss Kloss (reaching around the back of Jessie’s shoulders) grabbed her ponytail firmly and <em>yanked</em>, dropping her neatly back into her seat.</p><p>Judge Broadbent glared at Miss Swift for a moment before returning to Jessie. “Answer the question.”</p><p>“No,” said Jessie. “I haven’t been persuaded. I asked for help. I was afraid of my husband, and I asked Miss Swift for help, and she <em>did</em> help,” Jessie continued, her voice rising to a determined pitch. “She helped me when none of my neighbors would, and she believed me when even my own mum said I was imagining things, and she came and got me out of that place when no one else would have, and I owe her everything,” she concluded stoutly.</p><p>Judge Broadbent peered sharply at her over his spectacles. After a long moment of silence, he said, “Very well, then.” Banging his gavel, he added, “Motion for a divorce is granted. Do you have a place to stay?”</p><p>“She does,” Ms. Thompson said firmly. “With me.”</p><p>“And who might you be?” Judge Broadbent asked, not looking up from the papers he was busily signing. “A reformed bank robber?”<br/>
“Worse,” Ms. Thompson said tartly. “A retired librarian.”</p><p>“That <em>is</em> worse,” Judge Broadbent said. “More troublesome by far. All right, Miss Jessie. May God have mercy on your soul, you’re going home with a retired librarian. I expect the next time I see you in my courtroom, it shall be for inciting riot, or high treason, or arson.”</p><p>“Thank you, Your Honor,” Mr. Kloss demurred, and then they were free.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Being free, they went to the pub. Mr. Kloss ordered the first round, declaring that he had “never had such a satisfactory day in all his years of jurisprudence,” and so they drank to that. Then Ms. Thompson declared that, if she had known breaking and entering would be so satisfying, she would have started doing it years ago, and so they drank to that. Finally, Jessie proposed a toast to all her rescuers, especially Miss Swift, and they all drank so long and heartily to that, that Thomas was obliged to signal the bartender to begin pouring their second round, mere moments after bringing them their first.</p><p>“This <strong><em>is</em></strong> quite a triumph, Miss Swift,” Mr. Kloss was saying. “I would imagine that almost any elite detection agency you’d care to name would be interested in your services. What’s next for you?”</p><p>“I actually don’t know,” said Miss Swift cheerfully, reaching for a beer nut. “I hadn’t given it the slightest thought, actually. I suppose I better had!”</p><p>“Truly, the possibilities are endless,” said Mr. Kloss, and if Ms. Thompson noticed a slight twinkle in his eye, she was the only one. “Private insurance agencies operating out of Bern and Zurich; art houses in Amsterdam and Paris who want to track the movements of forgeries; even Scotland Yard.”</p><p>Thomas stood up abruptly. “I’ve—oh dearie me. I’ve… just forgotten. I meant to… I have something to do. An—errand. Please, carry on without me, I won’t be long. Meet you back at my place?” he asked Miss Swift, who looked confused but agreeable. “I’m so sorry to leave early, but truly, congratulations,” Thomas said to Jessie, who made room for him to squeeze out of the booth, trailing his coat and doubling back to tip the bartender with a massive handful of loose change. Once out of the pub, he went several steps down the street in the wrong direction before realizing it and doubling back, walking towards the center of town with a determined expression.</p><p>Ms. Thompson slid into the empty space beside Mr. Kloss. As a cloud of excited chatter once again rose from Jessie and the other girls, she leaned in to murmur: “That was an underhanded trick.”</p><p>Mr. Kloss smiled into his pint. “May the jewelers of Gaolgate Street have mercy on his soul.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The celebration extended into the evening, and when Miss Swift finally said her goodnights, the entire village was tinted in periwinkle blue. Overwarm from the pub, she removed her Juliette cap and walked with her blue serge suit jacket over one arm, enjoying the cool evening air and the chance to stretch her legs. Thomas’s flat was a few minutes’ walk away, on an uphill road leading out of town, and she slowed on a footbridge to enjoy the sound of the small brook which plashed underneath. She had grown fond of Stafford, very fond indeed, and Mr. Kloss’s suggestion had somewhat disconcerted her. She wondered, though, at the locus of her discontent. It was not that she had expected to stay in Stafford forever; truthfully, she had not thought beyond the immediate necessity of leaving Calvin far behind when she fled New York… could it only have been a month ago? It seemed impossible. She felt as though she had been in Stafford for years, already—such was her comfort with the tiny town. And yet she still wanted to learn more: about all the farms that dotted the hillsides and pastures around the town; about the hundreds of years of history buried in the local graveyard; about the underpinnings of it all. It was a familiar feeling, this overwhelming curiosity, but an unfamiliar way of feeling it—this curiosity had no end goal in mind. It was the excitement of solving a mystery, but without any mystery to solve.</p><p> </p><p>She stopped in front of Thomas’s house. Looked up at the open windows. Floating on the breeze, she could just faintly hear Hank Williams, crooning about getting back his sight. The door, in front of her, was slightly ajar. She crossed the threshold and climbed the steps, noticing as she did that the light in Thomas’s apartment was soft with candles. She surmounted the top step and looked into a sea of tiny, flickering lights. It seemed Thomas had put a candle in every teacup and saucer he owned. At some point, he had run out of teacups—on the sill, she noticed a stubby series of blue and white candles, guttering in flowerpots. Quietly, while she was looking about in wonder, Thomas entered the room.</p><p>“Hullo there,” he said softly.</p><p>“Hel<strong><em>lo</em></strong>,” Miss Swift said, dropping her jacket and hat on the one kitchen chair not bearing a lit candle. “What’s all this?”</p><p>“It’s an attempt,” said Thomas, “at a metaphor, of sorts. Er. For, what you have done. In my life.” </p><p>Miss Swift looked around the cramped and humble kitchen, its every dim corner illuminated and dull surface sparkling in reflected light. “It’s lovely.”</p><p>“Indeed it is,” said Thomas. When she turned her gaze back to him, the tiny box was open in his hand. Slowly, carefully, he took a knee in front of her. “Taylor.”</p><p>Her gloved hand flew to cover her mouth.</p><p>“You are so brave. You crossed an entire ocean just to see if you could help people on the other side. My life has been so small in comparison, but the lesson of loving you is that I have to love more. I have to risk more, I have to be braver, I have to be more outspoken. I may never be worthy of you, the most courageous and astonishing woman I have ever met. But I am willing to spend the rest of my life trying to be. Would you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”</p><p>Her eyes filled with tears. “Yes. Yes, absolutely, yes,” she exclaimed, and went to her knees to embrace him, their kiss awkward and more than a little streaked by tears as they clasped each other tightly, then fumbled to get her glove off and the pearl-and-diamond ring on her finger. “It’s beautiful.”</p><p>“Do you really think so? If you don’t like it, we can go tomorrow to get one that’s to your taste,” said Thomas, and she put her fingers across his lips.</p><p>“Hush. I won’t hear of it. I will never take this off, it’s perfect.”</p><p>“I thought it might be,” he said quietly, and they spent some time looking together, in quiet and perfect contentment, at the ring on her finger.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The next day, Miss Swift awoke with an urge to play hooky.</p><p>“Come now,” she urged Thomas from a rather comfortable position, chin pillowed on his chest. “No one will be looking for us. We’ve won the case! No one will notice if we skivvy off for the day to luxuriate in being engaged.”</p><p>“Emma <em>did</em> tell me she planned to enlist Jessie in a rather protracted sort through her cold case files,” said Thomas speculatively. “I believe she intends to see if the girl has any kind of a mind for historical research.”</p><p>Miss Swift snorted gently against his chest. “She <em>intends</em> to intrigue Jessie within an inch of her life. I shouldn’t be surprised if she pulls out all her most scandalous investigations.”</p><p>“Oh God. The apiarist’s dispute of Coton Clanford,” Thomas groaned, running his hand over his eyes. “No, you may laugh,” he remonstrated with Miss Swift, who was indeed giggling, “but it was a case so contentious that we had to drop it. Harsh remarks were made in the papers. Ms. Thompson had to temporarily cease going to the farmers’ market in Ranton entirely.”</p><p>Miss Swift mouthed a silent O. “And was that terribly inconvenient?”</p><p>Thomas began to answer but then noted the sparkle in her eyes. “You’re making fun of me.”</p><p>“Only a little,” she said. “So what about my plan? Come, slip away with me. You can pick the town, borrow Ms. Thompson’s car and meet me at the florist’s, I shall pack a hamper. We’ll find a tree somewhere to climb, or a meadow we can wander through. It will be <em>fun</em>.”</p><p>“All right,” said Thomas, tucking a tendril of Miss Swift’s hair behind her ear and smiling into her eyes. “We’ll go,” he said, and privately marveled that she thought he could possibly deny her anything.</p><p>“I’ll pack a hamper!” Miss Swift declared, almost leaping out of bed in her eagerness for an adventure.</p><p>“I’ll pick a route,” said Thomas, “and make some coffee.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>While he was fruitlessly attempting to light the burner on his cranky old Ahearn stovetop, Thomas’s phone began to ring. Shaking out a long match, he strode to the living room. “Hello?”</p><p>A querulous older voice; male; weak. “Is this Master Thomas Hiddlestone?”</p><p>“Hiddleston, yes,” said Thomas. “Of Stafford.”</p><p>“Yes. I’ve had a letter from you, with a drawing.”</p><p>“A letter?” Thomas said, before the penny dropped. “Oh, yes! A letter!” He scrambled for a pencil and pad. “Might I ask who this is? I sent letters of inquiry to several historians who’ve worked on signs and signets, you see.”</p><p>“I don’t doubt it,” said the high and thready voice, “But you’re lucky you got me. This is Dick Harris, of Cambridge.”</p><p>“Professor Harris,” said Thomas, feeling all of twelve years old again and scrutinized by the schoolmaster. “Thank you; I hadn’t expected to receive a call personally.”</p><p>“Heart congestion leaves you little time for anything more strenuous than phone calls, I’m afraid,” said the voice. “You’re awfully lucky I received your post when I did; I’m ninety-three. Never know when one might pop off, at this age.” The speaker was briefly waylaid by a chuckle that spasmed off into coughing, then eventually subsided into a mild wheeze. “Right. Where was I then? Right, your drawing. I have it here before me, and I have to say, your lady friend has something very special there.”</p><p>“Does she?”</p><p>“Indeed.  She has evidence of a secret society which operated in the very heart of Britain’s finest families, and the stateliest homes, for years. The Society of the Slotted Spoon.”</p><p>“The Society of the Slotted Spoon,” breathed Thomas. So this was what it felt like to tap against a library wall and have it swing open to reveal a hidden staircase; to dig at the spot marked “X” until spade hit wood; to read the Rosetta Stone. He remembered himself, tried to reel himself back into the world of the real. “Was it a form of trade union? Something like a guild? A cooking club, perhaps?”</p><p>“Heavens, no, nothing like that,” said Harris. “It was a ring of spies.”</p><p> </p><p>The Society of the Slotted Spoon, as Harris went on to explain it, was a French espionage network composed entirely of the kinds of people you would not expect to be spies: the un- and under-educated scullery maids, cooks, sweeps and drudges of all varieties that enabled the gracious country estates of the ruling class to function. “Women, mainly, with family members or lovers in the French army, passing back information that they gleaned from dinner table conversation, intercepted letters, indiscreet gossip in parlors and stables,” Thomas explained to a rapturous Miss Swift, who was nearly beside herself to discover the true nature of her family seal. “They could very easily have been hanged if they’d been caught. Professor Harris said that it was very likely the only reason none of them ever <em>was</em> caught<em>,</em> is that the Society was a purely oral tradition, and nothing was ever committed to paper. Every source he was able to find on the Society was secondary; recollections of granddaughters, memoirs ‘as dictated to’, letters obliquely referencing long-ago machinations. For the longest time, he said he wasn’t even sure he was researching a genuine group. Even the seal your grandmother drew is a secondary artifact, a stylized imagining from someone who had not seen the actual mark themselves.”</p><p>Miss Swift’s mouth made an O. “What does the real mark look like?”</p><p>“He said it was very subtle, easy to overlook. But I have good news. There’s one in the kitchens of Belvoir Castle.”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Belvoir Castle, when at last it lowed over the horizon, appeared somewhat sallow in the bright afternoon sunlight. Floating in its neatly raked border of yellow pea gravel, all trees drawn back a respectful distance, the castle played at illusions: you didn’t notice how big it was until you saw the tourists, scurrying around its foundations like mice at the baseboards.</p><p>“I don’t know how people manage in these little starter homes,” Miss Swift deadpanned as she climbed out of the car. “You’d always be on top of each other, nowhere to set down your drink.”</p><p>“Dreadfully inconvenient,” agreed Thomas, unlocking the boot where he had stored the picnic hamper and a largish sketchbook. “Shall we have lunch first? The daily tour doesn’t start until two, and I’d love to draw the place.”</p><p>“I think that’s the best idea I’ve heard all day.”</p><p>They found a secluded spot under the branches of an alder tree and spread out the picnic blanket. As Miss Swift unpacked cold chicken and nectarines, Thomas uncorked two bottles of good brown beer and began a rough charcoal outline of the battlements of Belvoir Castle. “I’ve always found the roofline of this place rather haunting,” he remarked.</p><p>“You’ve been here before?”</p><p>“Many times,” Thomas said. “First there were school trips, and then there was Ms. Thompson and her eternal quest to fill in the biographical gaps of the eighth Earl of Rutland. This is their family seat, you know. We’ve been through the tour, through the gardens, through the family mausoleum even. So far, nothing but dead ends.”</p><p>“Why is Ms. Thompson so interested?”</p><p>“Well, for a long time he was missing, and a missing earl is fairly rare,” said Thomas. “Especially during the War of the Roses, which is Emma’s favorite place to delve. But there’s no record of him, not in the peerage nor in the bastardy index. We were starting to wonder if we’d made him up completely, if he was simply a paper son composed of a lot of spelling errors, or a conflation of his three other brothers. But then we found his gravestone, and it’s utterly out of place in a cemetery in Yorkshire. We can’t figure out why, but we suspect he was a bit of a black sheep.”</p><p>“A homosexual?” Miss Swift said hopefully.</p><p>Thomas shook his head. “Ms. Thompson thinks not. He was given a very nice religious burial in a place of honor next to the church.”</p><p>“Damn,” said Miss Swift. “I always enjoy researching a good homosexual.”</p><p>“You’re perfect,” Thomas told her, and meant it.</p><p>Miss Swift held out her beer bottle for a light clank with his own. “Thank you. Secondarily, have you considered the possibility that your missing Earl was neither a bastard nor a black sheep, but simply a traveler who appreciated Yorkshire and voiced an urge to be buried there?”</p><p>Thomas thought over the possibility. “Have you ever been to Yorkshire?” he asked, and Miss Swift tossed her napkin at him. “No, no, that’s actually a good suggestion. I shall pass it on to Emma next time we discuss her pet Earl. Pass me one of those nectarines?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>At a quarter to two, Miss Swift stood and shook out the picnic blanket, and Thomas applied the last strokes of sepia pastel to his sketch before returning his book to the boot of the Austin. “Shall we?” He offered his elbow to Miss Swift, and they picked their way across the yellow gravel to the entrance of Belvoir Castle, where a group of three couples, plus one towering gentleman in glasses, waited for the tour guide to appear.</p><p>“Now then, Emma,” said one of the husbands, nodding at the ornamental battle axes which decorated the entrance. “Wouldn’t those look nice above the fireplace?”</p><p>Emma tittered, and the tall man in glasses rolled his eyes and turned away to watch the birds wheeling over the forested grounds.</p><p>“Think what it would have been like to work here when my ancestors did,” breathed Miss Swift, her eyes as big as saucers. “With nothing but carriages lined up the driveway, and women in their long dresses being helped out by footmen, and dinners and balls by candlelight. It must have been so romantic.”</p><p>“A<em>ctually</em>,” interjected one of the husbands who had been eavesdropping, “Everyone would have stunk terribly from not bathing, and the light would have been provided by whale oil lamps, not beeswax tapers, which stunk even more. Your fairy-tale fantasy would be more like a nightmare.”</p><p>Miss Swift pegged the husband with a withering look, and Thomas, fighting every British instinct in his entire body, drew a deep breath. He had to prove himself worthy of this extraordinary woman who had somehow agreed to marry him. “In point of fact,” he began, “Miss Swift is eminently correct. The trade in whale oil had barely begun to climb in the early period of the Regency, and the British prided themselves on frequent ablutions, we know this from primary sources. In fact, she is utterly correct in every aspect of her imaginative supposition. It <em>would</em> have been romantic,” he told Miss Swift, stoutly.</p><p>She was gazing up at him with a starry expression. “I knew you were the man of my dreams,” she told him, and he ignored the huff of the flustered husband to give her a lingering kiss.</p><p>“Now then, only nine today for the walking tour?” said a Belvoir employee, approaching the group with a clipboard in hand, and Miss Swift and Thomas broke apart like teenagers caught necking in a movie theater.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>First on the tour was the marvelous entry hall, rendered even more imposing by the display of dozens of battle axes and halberds, mounted on the walls in sinister array.</p><p>“Are these all real?” Miss Swift whispered to Thomas, who shook his head minutely. “Reproductions.”</p><p>“At the peak of the window you can see the coat of arms of the Duke, featuring a peacock in his pride, a duke’s coronet, and two unicorns argent,” said the tour guide. “Now, who remembers their French and can tell me the meaning of the motto beneath the seal?”</p><p>A moment of stunned silence greeted the question, until Miss Swift poked Thomas gently in the ribs. “You <em>know</em> this,” she encouraged him <em>sotto voce</em>.</p><p>Thomas sheepishly raised his hand. “Strive to Attain?” he guessed, and the tour guide smiled. “Quite right, quite right, ‘strive to attain’. Rather a common saying around here, the family had it inscribed on the wall of the Lady Manners school and we used to line up beneath it for inspections. Now, let’s talk about the meaning of all these stripes and symbols on the coat of arms. Who knows what ‘a lion passant guardant’ means?” Thomas allowed his attention to drift upwards to the glowing beams that vaulted the ceiling, surely polished by servants on high ladders. Between the beams was plaster, in this room painted a soft fawn so as not to detract from the glittering steel below. According to Professor Harris, the imprint of the Slotted Spoon society could be found hidden in similar interstitial plaster, in the kitchen of the great castle. “It is easy to miss,” the great academician had said, “because it is meant to be.” Thomas marveled at the cunning, the boldness, of Miss Swift’s anonymous ancestor. Surely she must have been afraid. The penalty for espionage was as brutal for scullery drudges as it was for society dandies; perhaps more so, when compounded by the audience’s scorn. Something in that anonymous woman must have outweighed the fear; a love affair seemed possible, but knowing Miss Swift and her endless thirst for adventure, perhaps it had been something as simple and elemental as the urge to see if she could do it. He could not imagine an ancestor of Miss Swift’s being content to wrap her life in a kitchen maid’s apron and descend into an unmarked grave. Having a secret life, a hidden identity—a spy for Napoleon!—must have been <em>delicious</em>. They passed through the entry hall and a series of side parlors, each set up for a different genteel pastime: chamber music, cards, afternoon tea. The opinionated husband who had attempted to pierce Miss Swift’s imaginative bubble did not speak, though his face remained a deep and ruddy maroon, and he kept sending cutting glances in their direction. Sensing the tension, Emma and her husband (who name, they learned, was Hugh) struck up a mighty gale of conversation with the other married couple on the tour, Beau and Trish, mainly centering on other castle tours they had taken, and how much nicer, or less nice, every aspect of Belvoir Castle was by comparison. The tall man with glasses appeared to be focusing some considerable energy on ignoring this tidal wave of chatter, and kept his own counsel.</p><p>“Here, you can see the classic British scene of the fox hunt writ large,” said the tour guide, indicating a series of paintings hung, at intervals, around the gentlemen’s cigar retreat. “This sequence of paintings, meant to be read clockwise beginning at the entrance, contains a religious allegory, top marks if you can spot it.”</p><p>“Oooh, is it Samson and Delilah?” guessed Trish, pointing to a particularly well-muscled fox hunter in the second painting.</p><p>“Let me guess,” said Miss Swift, very low, so only Thomas could hear her. “The fox is Satan.”</p><p>“Actually, Jesus. It’s a terribly convoluted metaphor I’m convinced was only included to assuage the conscience of some particularly religious duchess,” said Thomas. Miss Swift snorted, and the couple endured the censorious gaze of the red-faced husband before the group’s conversation resumed.</p><p>“I apologize,” Thomas muttered under his breath to his fiancée, as the group continued into the main dining room. “I did not anticipate the nuances of the group tour experience.”</p><p>She squeezed his hand in response; but as they entered into the main dancing hall, a new horror revealed itself.</p><p>“And now, we experience the true grandeur of a night at Belvoir!” said the guide, dropping the needle on a record in the corner of the room and dialing up the volume of an unseen amplifier system. “Can you feel the magic that would have enchanted every guest of the duke and duchess?” Holding his hand out to an imaginary partner, the guide vaulted up on his tip-toes to take two; three turns around the massive parquet floor, humming along with the music—a stately waltz. “Let’s all give it a try, shall we?” he cried energetically, gesturing to open the floor to the group. “Here, you go here, and you go here…”</p><p>Soon, the entire group was shepherded into positions across from each other on the dancing floor, with Miss Swift positioned exactly between Thomas and the tall man with glasses. “Here we encounter an awkward issue of numbers,” said the tour guide. “Normally, during an evening event at the castle, guest lists would have been carefully managed to avoid an imbalance of gentlemen and ladies on the dance floor. However, in modern times we must muddle through these moments with good grace, and so I shall volunteer myself as an extra lady for the group.” He took a deep bow, to relieved giggles from Emma and Trish, and aligned himself on the women’s side of the lineup.</p><p>“Now, on the count of four, I should like everyone to extend their right hands to their partners, and enter a deep curtsy, if a lady, or a bow, if a gentleman.” He darted down the center of the aisle, making a flurry of adjustments to subtle issues of posture and carriage before returning to his spot, in a deep curtsy opposite Thomas. “Excellent! You have now opened the dance, and we will proceed in promenade from the head of the chain, where I am, to the foot of the chain, where Hugh and Emma find themselves.” Painstakingly guiding the couples through each step of the dance, nudging strays into place, the tour guide managed a minor miracle; a complete rigaudon, with only minor deviations from the untrained tourists. After a brief period of stiffness, Thomas actually found himself rather enjoying the dance, especially as Miss Swift began to relax and enjoy herself as well, her natural cheer beginning to overcome the awkwardness of being thrown together with strangers. When the dance came to a close, they found themselves joining hands again, all the original couples returned to each other through some mathematical miracle. The tour guide, flush with triumph, accepted a spontaneous round of applause before bidding the group onward into the master dining hall. “Imagine it—the ladies, giggling from the excitement of the dance; the candlelight, reflecting off every facet of cut crystal and polished silver; the servers, standing at attention in crisp and perfect livery.”</p><p>“Perhaps standing a little too close, eavesdropping for war secrets while they served the soup,” whispered Miss Swift to Thomas, who smiled at the thought.</p><p>“A typical supper at Belvoir during the height of its Regency grandeur would have involved many courses,” said the guide. “It might have begun with a clear turtle soup, brought out in a tureen painted to resemble the shell, followed by a fish cooked <em>en papiotte</em>, followed by a great platter of carrots glazed in honey. After a brief pause for conversation and champagne, the second course would follow. Allow me to read briefly from this menu, which head cook Laurent Olivier recorded in his diary in 1817: ‘second course, which was well received, included beef cheek in aspic, a selection of glazed fruits, chilled celery, sardines, a duck swimming in cress, pigeons stuffed with chestnuts, a cherry glaceé, herbed salmon, pears cooked in champagne, cold-buttered radishes with salt, and a chocolate souffle.”</p><p>“Dear <em>me</em>,” breathed Trish, prompting a gale of giggles from the ladies.</p><p>“Indeed,” said the tour guide, “a menu from nearly any point in Belvoir’s history is truly a glimpse into another world. Who would like to see where such a feast was created?”</p><p>Miss Swift’s hand shot up into the air.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>The air, as the tour group descended the three flights of stairs into the castle’s kitchen, cooled noticeably.</p><p>“Keep in mind that, on a typical night in old Belvoir, this staircase would scarcely have been passable,” the tour guide said. “Not only would servers have been kept running up and down bringing dishes to and fro, but the heat would have been hellish, as we descended into the historical kitchens, which are now kept in a state of display. The ventilation was negligible, and fire protections nearly nonexistent; the noise would have been nearly unbearable. This is why the kitchens were kept so far away from the rest of the house.”</p><p>Miss Swift, as she descended, peeked over her shoulder at Thomas—her expression was one of glee. “Isn’t it <em>wonderful??”</em>  she whispered. “To think! The smells! The heat! It would have been like descending into hell!”</p><p>“You are,” Thomas whispered back, “the only woman on earth who could imagine such a scene and then describe it as wonderful.”</p><p>She twinkled back at him, and then they were in the kitchen, with its vaulted ceilings, echoing stone floors, and acres and acres of darkened ranges. “Notice how each range has a corresponding chute for coal—this is to maximize the efficiency of deliveries to the stoves, which would have been stoked and roaring at full capacity for a banquet night at Belvoir. One such evening is on record as having cost, in modern dollars, nearly forty thousand pounds—and they held another the very next night.” The group ooh’d and ahh’d, but Thomas and Miss Swift were not listening—they were walking around the perimeter of the room, eyes pinned to the ceilings, locked in silent striving competition to be the first to clap eyes on the tiny mark described by Professor Harris. Thomas was so absorbed, in fact, that he almost didn’t notice that Miss Swift had come to a sudden halt at the other side of the kitchen, standing stock-still beneath a rack of hanging pots.</p><p>“You may notice the tilted copper ramps designed to facilitate the slide of pots directly from the range, following use, to the sinks,” the tour guide said. “They would have been sizzling when they hit the water, helping to keep the sinks hot and to facilitate the potwasher’s jobs, though I daresay they must have resembled lobsters by the end of each night. No rubber gloves for these lasses!”</p><p>Thomas, catching on, stepped up behind Miss Swift, casting his eyes upward past the pots to the vaulted ceiling above. High up in the recesses, close to the anchoring point for the pot rack, there was a shadow. Perhaps nothing; perhaps only a missed cobweb. But, when you turned your head in the light, perhaps not.</p><p>Miss Swift turned her head only slightly to mutter to Thomas. “Have you the sketching charcoal still on your person?”</p><p>Thomas blinked. “You can’t be serious.”</p><p>“Completely. If you still have it, I can get up there and make a rubbing of it.”</p><p>“<em>How?”</em> Thomas hissed, reaching into his coat and passing her the charcoal, wrapped in a grocery list.</p><p>“Just trust me, I know I can do it. Go on without me, distract the rest of the group?”</p><p>It seemed pointless to argue with Miss Swift, so Thomas complied, and waited until two rooms past the kitchens before feigning a sudden and crashing migraine. All the ladies went diving into their purses in search of Bufferin, the tour guide went upstairs to ask the infirmary for a cold compress, and the husbands stood around muttering out the sides of their mouths together about how migraine seemed somewhat of a womanly complaint. Thomas clutched a large and very expensive vase, tilting it alarmingly it whenever attentions seemed to wander, and hoped it would be enough to give Miss Swift the time she needed.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In the kitchen, Miss Swift worked quickly, toeing off her shoes and dragging a chair over to the preparation table. Nimble in her stocking feet, she climbed atop the chair before stepping onto the table and dragging the chair up after her. Eyes fixed to the shadow she’d spotted on the ceiling, she positioned the chair underneath the pot rack and began to climb into the center of the forest of hanging copper. So focused was she, that she didn’t hear the tall man enter the kitchen.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“Oh, thank you very kindly,” Thomas was saying to an offered packet of Fiorinal, when the tour guide returned with a cold compress.</p><p>“Is it getting any better?”</p><p>“Thank you, yes,” said Thomas. “These just come on very suddenly, sometimes, when the light hits my eyes a certain way.”</p><p>“I understand, dearie,” said Trish, sympathetically patting him. “I had a maiden aunt who got them whenever she smelled mint.”</p><p>“Me mam used to get them when she ate hard cheese,” said Emma.</p><p>“My sister used to get them at her time of the month,” said Hugh, cuttingly, and Beau covered a smirk. Emma and Trish both turned to look disapprovingly at their husbands.</p><p>“Hugh, <em>really</em>,” Emma said, and that was when Thomas noticed the missing member of the tour group. He stood up so fast he nearly knocked over the expensive vase in earnest. “Which way back to the kitchen?”</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>When he entered the kitchen, it took him several moments to puzzle together the strange scene; Miss Swift, standing in her sock feet atop a chair which itself was atop an enormous marble table; at the base of this precarious pyramid, the tall man and a gun. He was speaking to Miss Swift, low and intensely; the gun, a short, snub-nosed affair, was pointed directly up her skirt. Thomas could not hear exactly the nature of the muttered threat, but the word “reputation” broke through to his hearing; as the kitchen door swung open, the tall man swung his attention, and the barrel of the gun, towards Thomas.</p><p>“Ah then, Mister Hiddleston,” he said. “I was expecting you. Please close the door behind you.”</p><p>Thomas did, slowly, looking at Miss Swift as he did so. She stared back at him, wide-eyed.</p><p>“And throw the lock, if you please,” the tall man added.</p><p>Thomas turned slowly to the door, taking in the long deadbolt and registering that there was no way to fake closing it—he would have to slide the bolt home, closing them into the kitchen with an armed maniac.</p><p>“Now, please. I’ve had enough of the guided tour,” added the tall man, and Thomas blinked in recognition. Yes, he was sure of it now; and, as he recognized the voice, a whole host of other realizations fell into place. He guided the bolt home and locked them in. “Doctor Gottwald, I presume?” he said, trying to keep his voice light and his tone wry, lest Miss Swift believe her fiancé to be a coward. He hoped she couldn’t see his fingers shake.</p><p>“That’s right.”</p><p>“What is the meaning of this?”</p><p>“You don’t seem to listen very well on the phone,” said the doctor. “I thought an in-person chat might be called for. I trust a home visit won’t be necessary.”</p><p>“What do you want,” Thomas said, his tone lowering on every word until, at ‘want’, it hit the very basement of sound his ribcage could produce. The pistol’s ugly pug nose stayed unwavering, aiming at an area somewhere between Thomas’s heart and his throat.</p><p>“It’s very simple,” said Doctor Gottwald. “I want you to stop interfering in my business. Bothering my patients. Sticking your noses in their marriages. Orchestrating their abductions from secure facilities meant to <em>help</em> them. None of this is helping, in case you were wondering. Those women are just as fragile as the day you began interfering with my treatment—maybe more so, now that you’ve confused their minds and disrupted the crucial trust between doctor and patient.”</p><p>“But the trust isn’t between you and your patients,” said Thomas, inching forward. “The trust is between you and their <em>husbands</em>. These women didn’t consent to being drugged and institutionalized by you—their husbands requested it, and you facilitated it.”</p><p>“I trust my patients’ husbands to act in their best interest,” Doctor Gottwald said smoothly. “Which is more than I can say for the actions of an American busybody who arrived here hardly a month ago and began causing trouble immediately, all for the sake of a profit motive.”</p><p>“She hasn’t taken a penny from these women,” said Thomas somewhat heatedly. “Not a single penny. She’s offered them nothing but friendship, nothing but a listening ear and the promise that she would believe them and offer her voice in support.”</p><p>“You should never promise to believe someone before you’ve heard what they had to say,” the Doctor said. “Come now. Simple scientific objectivity must dictate that there are two sides to every story. Did it never occur to you that those husbands could have told you more about the truth of their wives’ mental state, unclouded by heat or emotion? You’re a detective, Master Hiddleston. This is sloppy detective work,” the doctor said, in chiding tones so deeply somnolent that they almost sounded reasonable. Thomas looked at Miss Swift on the chair—at her wide eyes, her tense face--looked at the pistol in the doctor’s hand. And knew what he had to do.</p><p>“If you really believed that,” Thomas said, pulling himself up to his full height and trying not to think about the possibility of a bullet in the throat, “You would not be holding me at gunpoint, nor would you be intimidating my fiancée. If you really felt protected by logic and science, you would be dragging us into a court of law, not skulking after us through a remote castle. And if the truth really lay at the exact midpoint between a frightened woman and the man who holds all legal power over her, we wouldn’t, at this very moment, have a houseful of brilliant, able, determined women working day and night to stop you.”</p><p>And with that, Miss Swift brought a large frying pan down, directly on top of the doctor’s head.</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>SIX MONTHS LATER</strong>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>“I should like to say,” Thomas said to the assembled wedding guests, “that I take credit for this match, but as all of you who know me can testify, I spend much of my life trotting along at high speed after my wife and her friends, hoping to keep up. It was in that capacity that I was privileged to witness the introduction of my friend, Emma Thompson, to the redoubtable David Kloss.” He tipped his head, briefly, towards the head of the table, where a beaming Mr. Kloss was cuddling a rosy-cheeked Emma, resplendent in ivory linen and already listing slightly to her left.</p><p>“Of course, it being Emma,” Thomas continued, “The meeting would not have been complete</p><p>without a minor amount of bloodshed, the destruction of a birdbath, and a strongly worded complaint from the neighbors, all of which was proven very thoroughly worthwhile when it was revealed that Emma and her new acquaintance had helped to stop a psychopathic criminal in his tracks, thus liberating five women from unjust bondage. Which is a hell of a first date.”</p><p>“Hear, hear,” said Cyd, raising her glass high, and the rest of the wedding guests in the small restaurant clinked their glasses together in a chorus of glass. At the head of the table, Emma, glowing with pleasure, attempted to simultaneously wave off Thomas’s compliment and dab furtively under her eyes with a napkin.</p><p>Thomas continued. “But of course, this is the kind of thing that happens when you befriend a librarian. In the more than fifteen years I have known her, I have seen Emma excavate a flooded basement to reach a box of waterlogged periodicals; change a tire in the middle of a hailstorm on top of a mountain which she had driven up in order to attempt to trace the roots of a medieval property line; dig up a 14<sup>th</sup> century charnelhouse to win a bet—I still owe you a tenner for that, Emma—and defy every limitation accorded to her. David: this is the force of nature who has just honored you with her hand in marriage. I congratulate you, and advise you to invest in the sturdiest wellies, torches, and foul weather gear that money can buy. Your marriage shall be a hurricane. What a privilege. What an adventure. To the bride and groom.”</p><p>“To the bride and groom,” chorused the guests, their glasses held high. At the center table, a circle of women held their champagne flutes touched together just a moment longer than the other guests. Vanessa, her eyes brimming with happy tears, caught Jessie’s gaze across the glowing table; and the five free wives shared a quiet moment of understanding before they drank.  </p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Walking home arm in arm by a slightly serpentine path, Thomas and his wife (he still reeled to call her that—in his head, she was still the unattainable Miss Swift) discussed the perfection of the wedding.</p><p>“Did you see how happy she was when she saw all her librarian friends were in attendance!”</p><p>“I kept telling her they wouldn’t miss it, but you know Emma. Can’t quite believe she’s got as many friends as she has.”</p><p>Miss Swift—he <em>had</em> to stop calling her that, it was embarrassing—Mrs. Swift-Hiddleston, yes, that was it, looked up at the sparkling stars with a dreamy expression. “I still can’t believe Cyd caught the bouquet.”</p><p>“Why not? She stands a full head taller than all the other bridesmaids.”</p><p>She shrugged. “Cyd’s never been a joiner. It was nice to see her getting in the mix with all the other girls.”</p><p>“Well, she’s gotten most of them jobs at the phone company, I should think they’d all be thick as thieves.”</p><p>“Indeed, oh remind me tomorrow when I’ve sobered up, I need to talk to Jessie about that call log she’s keeping for me on Mister… what’s his name, the slick banker with the showy car.”</p><p>“Braun, I think it was.”</p><p>“Yes, him. That slippery fellow. I think I might have had a breakthrough on how we can expose him, but it’s complicated, and we’ll need Emma and Vanessa both to pose as clients attempting to open new accounts. Do you think they would do it?”</p><p>“I think they would relish it,” Thomas answered honestly. “Do give Emma time to set down her bags from the honeymoon before you call her, though. I think she has been longing for Majorca more than she lets on.”</p><p>“I would never ask Emma to join an adventure one single instant before she was ready,” Mrs. Swift-Hiddleston answered loyally. “I shall give her a full five-minute head start after she returns from the fortnight.”</p><p>“There’s my good lass,” Thomas responded, coming to a stop beneath the gently swaying sign for Swift-Hiddleston Investigations. In the glow of the winter streetlamps, it looked dazzlingly fresh, the raised arm and slotted ladle emblem neatly painted in hunter green against a deep cream background. But Thomas’s gaze was not fixed upon the sign. He, and Mrs. Swift-Hiddleston, were looking with deep satisfaction upon the subtler sign embedded above the door of the florist’s shop: a set of three parallel grooves, pressed into fresh plaster, the center one deepest. An ancient sign, made with the humblest of kitchen implements, signaling only the will to hear the unheard, to catch the unsaid. The Sign of the Slotted Spoon.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This fic owes a hefty thanks for its existence to Taffy Brodesser-Akner, whose profile of Tom Hiddleston in GQ remains the high-water mark in the art of interviewing. Go read it here if you want to see a master at work: https://www.gq.com/story/tom-hiddleston-cover-profile </p><p>Finally, as with all my fics, I owe a great debt of gratitude for this fic to JenTheSweetie, my tireless editor, who has read countless updates of this story over the last four years and offered insightful criticism on all of them--even the ones I ended up snipping out for inscrutable reasons, which must have made her want to tear her hair out. Thanks, Sweetie.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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